Douglas Wilson’s Letter from Moscow

The Politics of the Tithe

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

August 5, 2014

I think it was Luther who said that a man required two conversions, the first of his heart and the second of his wallet. Have you ever noticed how some people are preeminently quotable, such that all sorts of pithy sayings get attributed to them whether or not they said it? So Luther, or maybe Chesterton, or Churchill, or maybe Oscar Wilde. It fits best with Luther though, so let’s run with that.

I want to begin by summarizing in a paragraph what I understand our obligations with regard to tithing to be, and then to briefly expand on each one of those points.

The tithe is a continuing moral obligation for the people of God (1 Cor. 9:13-14). The lawful recipients of the tithe are those who labor in the ministry (1 Cor. 9:14), the poor (Dt. 14:29), and the merchants who supply the goods for your thanksgiving feasts (Dt. 14:23-29). The tithe is owed on the increase of wealth (Dt. 14:22), not on the wealth itself. The tithe is to be paid on the increase that is brought into your barns, and not on the part of the crop that the locusts ate, which has ramifications for the old net/gross question. And last, the church is to teach authoritatively on the obligation to tithe, but is not to do so in any way that could reasonably be interpreted as a self-serving merchandizing of the gospel (Phil. 4:17).

So let’s work through these.
First, there is no dispute that the Levites of the Old Testament were supported by the tithe. They had no inheritance like the other tribes; the Lord was their inheritance. This meant that their needs were supplied by the tithe that the other tribes paid on their increase. Paul says in 1 Cor. 9:14 that ministers of the gospel in the new covenant were to be supported in exactly the same way (even so, just the same way, kai houtos). The tithe predated Moses (Heb. 7:2), and the tithe has survived him.

The tithe is not limited to what goes into the offering at church. A portion of it should go there (Gal. 6:6), of course, but it may also go to your cousin with Wycliffe, the homeless guy at the bus station, Add it all up, and it should come to at least ten percent of your increase.

So what should we interpret as the increase? If you were an apple farmer, the increase would be ten percent of the apples you brought in every year. If there was a blight, and you had no apples, you would not be required to cut down ten percent of your trees to make up for it. On top of that, if the Midianite IRS came in and took a bunch of your apples,  and ran off cackling, you would not have to tithe on the net value of their plunder. What you brought back to  your place in baskets, tithe on that.

But fortunately, there is such a thing as free will offering. If you tithe on gross, that is not a problem at all. “The liberal soul shall be made fat: And he that watereth shall be watered also himself.” (Proverbs 11:25). The Scriptures teach that money is seed, and those who tithe on gross are not heretical, but merely generous. As John Bunyan put it somewhere (or maybe it was Oscar Wilde) . . .

There was a man, some thought him mad,
The more he gave, the more he had.

Nancy and I solve the net/gross problem simply, and that is by doing both. With those checks we receive that have withholding withheld, we tithe the face value of the check. But we also get payments that the locusts have not gotten to (royalty payments, etc.) We always want to structure our affairs so that we are consistently on the north slope of ten percent.

Ben Carson for President!

Two Big Un-PC Ideas

Further to our recent post on Dr Ben Carson speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, a columnist in the Wall Street Journal is calling out a new slogan: “Ben Carson for President”.

The Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon has two big ideas for America.

The Wall Street Journal 
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
February 8, 2013, 6:03 p.m. ET

Whether this weekend finds you blowing two feet of snow off the driveway or counting the hours until “Downton Abbey,” make time to watch the video of Dr. Ben Carson speaking to the White House prayer breakfast this week.

Seated in view to his right are Senator Jeff Sessions and President Obama. One doesn’t look happy. You know something’s coming when Dr. Carson says, “It’s not my intention to offend anyone. But it’s hard not to. The PC police are out in force everywhere.”

Dr. Carson tossed over the PC police years ago.
Raised by a single mother in inner-city Detroit, he was as he tells it “a horrible student with a horrible temper.” Today he’s director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins and probably the most renowned specialist in his field.

Late in his talk he dropped two very un-PC ideas. The first is an unusual case for a flat tax: “What we need to do is come up with something simple. And when I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the universe, God, and he’s given us a system. It’s called a tithe.

“We don’t necessarily have to do 10% but it’s the principle. He didn’t say if your crops fail, don’t give me any tithe or if you have a bumper crop, give me triple tithe. So there must be something inherently fair about proportionality. You make $10 billion, you put in a billion. You make $10 you put in one. Of course you’ve got to get rid of the loopholes. Some people say, ‘Well that’s not fair because it doesn’t hurt the guy who made $10 billion as much as the guy who made 10.’ Where does it say you’ve got to hurt the guy? He just put a billion dollars in the pot. We don’t need to hurt him. It’s that kind of thinking that has resulted in 602 banks in the Cayman Islands. That money needs to be back here building our infrastructure and creating jobs.”

Not surprisingly, a practicing physician has un-PC thoughts on health care:

“Here’s my solution: When a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account to which money can be contributed—pretax—from the time you’re born ’til the time you die. If you die, you can pass it on to your family members, and there’s nobody talking about death panels. We can make contributions for people who are indigent. Instead of sending all this money to some bureaucracy, let’s put it in their HSAs. Now they have some control over their own health care. And very quickly they’re gong to learn how to be responsible.”

The Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon may not be politically correct, but he’s closer to correct than we’ve heard in years.

>Is Taxation Lawful?

>Like Pirates on the Beach

Political Dualism – Mere Christendom
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, March 07, 2011

I received a question from a reader who agreed with my general thinking about government robberies, but wondered if I believed that any taxation whatever amounted to theft. And if I thought that some taxation was, and some was not, then how to tell the difference? Is it simply done on the basis of what I think is prudent?
So there are basically three questions. The first concerns whether or not there is such a thing as taxation which is not theft. And the answer is yes — there is such a thing as lawful taxation (Num. 3:47; Rom. 13:7). It does exist. To maintain that all taxation is theft by definition is to take a hard libertarian/anarchist view of civil government which is not warranted in Scripture.

The second question is whether, given the lawfulness of taxation as a general question, it is possible for a government to steal. If taxation is can be lawful, it is possible for a government to steal? And again, the answer is yes. If Ahab had gotten Naboth’s vineyard by means of “land reform,” or “zoning adjustments,” or “eminent domain,” it would not have made it any less stealing. Or if Ahab had just applied property taxes to the vineyard (total, 5,000 dollars) with the entire vineyard (worth five million) being the collateral for the tax liability, then that would have been another form of stealing.

So some taxes are simply legalized stealing. Jesus tells us that the sons are exempt from taxes, and yet He has Peter pay a tax voluntarily to prevent the giving of offense (Matt. 17:25-26). The principle that can be gathered here is that a government entity claimed that a tax was owed, and Jesus said that it was not really owed. In such a circumstance, if the government takes that amount by force, the only way we could define it would be by the word “stealing.”

Take this another way. If a throne can be “unrighteous” in general (Prov. 25:5), then a throne can be unrighteous in the specifics. God’s law provides us with the very definition of unrighteousness, and this means that governments can steal.

So the third question is, how do we tell the difference? Before answering, we should note that every Christian who grants that a government can steal is obligated to tell us where he thinks the dividing line is. The only alternative would be to maintain that the civil government has an absolute claim on all property, and that while it might let the peons “use” some of it some of the time, this is just because they are being nice.

If you believe (as I do) that it could be possible for a man to rape his wife, then you have the obligation to be able to distinguish lawful intercourse from unlawful. No human authority is absolute. If you believe (as I do) that governments can (and do) steal, then you have to be able to state where and why you think that.

Boondoggles and redistribution of wealth are clear symptoms that something has gone wrong, just as a drunken band of pirates divvying up the booty around a bonfire on the beach is a similar indication. But the act of piracy occurred earlier. Waste, fraud, and abuse are also symptomatic. That is what happens when pirates spend the money. What is the heart of the thievery? Where is the point when pirates get the money?

I would suggest that Samuel tells us. When he is warning the people of Israel about the coming predations of a king, there are numerous aspects to that warning, but one of them has to do with taxation. Samuel says that if they take a king “like the other nations,” then it is conceivable that the tax rate might actually get up to ten percent (1 Sam. 8:15-17). We are so far gone in our folly that we would give anything to get back to ten percent.

And so here is where I would draw the line. Ten percent is significant because that is what Almighty God claims. The tithe of God is a prerogative of God. I don’t believe that it is possible for a king, or a congress, or a parliament, or a president, to claim that much or more without setting itself up as a rival to God, which is exactly what our governments have done.

So, in sum, I would be happy with an 8% flat tax. The government may want more than that, for governments always do. But they certainly don’t need more than that.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>A Brief Theology of Designated Gifts
Church Government – Elders of the Church
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, November 03, 2010

So let us begin by defining terms. Financial support of the Lord’s work can be divided into two categories–tithes and offerings. With the tithe, the amount is specified by the Lord (10% of the increase, by definition), and then three broad categories are authorized as proper recipients of this tithe. Those three categories are the priests and Levites (Mal. 3:10), the poor (Dt. 14:28-29), and the tithe festival (Dt. 14:22-27). In addition to the tithe, we have the category of offerings, which were a function of votive fulfillment or of simple generosity. Hence the common phrase, “tithes and offerings.”

Since in Israel the poor were remembered every third year, there are two understandings of the tithe. Some see three tithes, one of them paid every third year, which would be a total of just over 23%. Others, like myself, take this as three legitimate places where the one tithe (a total of 10%) would go.

Offerings can either be “above and beyond” gifts to regular recipients of the tithe, or they may be generous gifts to projects that would not normally be funded by the tithe at all. Since offerings are not required, it is lawful for them to go anywhere it is lawful for money to go.

So translated into modern terms, the tithe can go to the church and its ministries, to the poor, or to some kind of Thanksgiving festival. How much of the tithe should go to the poor is not to be determined by the ministers, and how much should go to the ministers is not determined by the party planners. All this is determined by the one who has the responsibility before God to give the tithe in the first place. Now, this would obviously be just as true (if not more so) if someone determined to give an offering to any one of these three. If a man has the authority to give a financial gift to pay for playground equipment in a city park, then how much more does he have the authority to give it all to the poor, or all to Bible translation work? So in the Bible, both tithes and offerings are what we would call designated gifts.

We can see this more clearly if we ask to whom does the tithe belong? The scriptural answer is that the tithe is the Lord’s. It belongs to Him. The tithe is “holy to the Lord” (Lev. 27:32), and it is the responsibility of the tither to see to it that the recipient of the tithe really is holy. In a time of apostasy and declension, when the priests and Levites are corrupt, it was not a problem for a tither to redirect his tithe to recipients who were worthy. This is what happened, for example, with Elisha and his followers. They were not “official,” but they were holy men and dedicated to the Lord. Schools of the prophets were parachurch ministries, and yet a man from Baal-shalisha brought his tithe to them (2 Kings. 4:42-44). God was with them, and the tithe can be given wherever the Lord is.

In considering this, we need to remember the fundamental distinction between sins and crimes. A sin is defined by Scripture, but unless Scripture also assigns a public penalty that can be assigned by human authority, it remains solely a sin, and not a crime. This means that scripturally speaking, failure to tithe is a sin, not a crime. There is no record in Scripture anywhere of a penalty levied against a non-tither by anyone other than God Himself. God is the enforcer of the tithe, and He does in fact enforce it (Mal. 3: 8-9). The tithe is God’s tax. He collects it, He keeps track of it, and He has no need of an IRS to do His work for Him.

The task of the authorized recipients of the tithe is in gracious expenditure, not in legal collection. The church should use the tithe to minister, not to collect additional tithes. The poor should use the money given them. The attendees at the Thanksgiving festival should eat and drink the tithe, and do nothing else with it. But there is always pressure on the church to drift away from being a tithe recipient and into being a tithe gatherer. There is a deep problem with this, as we shall see.

The giver of the tithe is trusting God. “How do I know that God will bless the remaining 90%?” So also must the recipient of the tithe learn to trust God. “How do we know if God will continue to finance the work we have to do, unless we lean on the givers a little bit?” The whole point of the tithe is to demonstrate our total and complete trust in God. There is no arrangement of ecclesiastical finances under which trusting God becomes unnecessary.

The principle is that the tither has a great deal of latitude when it comes to the amount a particular recipient might get. But we should not misunderstand what is meant by latitude. He can’t use the tithe to buy himself a new flat screen television, for example, but he does have the authority to decide whether to give it to the poor, or to the Levites, or to poor Levites, or to throw a party for the Levites. Further, he can determined to give 10% here and 90% there, or the other way around. The entire system of tithes and offerings in the Bible presupposes the discretion of the giver. “Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver (2 Co 9:7).

Everything else being equal, those who are taught and ministered to by a particular church should support that church (Gal. 6:6-10), but this does not mandate that all his tithe must go to that church. He could give half his tithe to his local church, and give the other half to his cousin on the mission field, and not be doing anything contrary to what the Bible requires. The common (and erroneous) notion that the storehouse of Mal. 3:10 is referring to the church, and nothing but the church, is what might be called a self-serving doctrine. The storehouse was simply a tithe-barn, built to handle the tithes that would in fact some in.

This does not mean that every local church has an obligation to process all the tithes and offerings of its members, regardless of where the tithe recipients might be (a third cousin of a member’s nephew, now serving with YWAM, say). But it does mean that if a local church is committed to a particular minister or ministry, then they should be open to what might be called a tithe-feedback loop. They should be open to designated gifts for their ministers or ministries. A closed door to designated gifts means that a church is deciding to not allow themselves access to important information that can come from Spirit-led giving. Once that information is closed off, the decisions (which still have to be made) will be made in accordance with some policy or other. And thus it is that churches become bureaucracies.

In conclusion, three applications.

Give, and it will be given to you again (Luke 6:38). This is a foundational Christian principle. The foundational Christian principle is not “make sure others give,” or “make sure others give the right amounts or in the right way.” Parishioners should in fact be taught how to give the right way, but they should be taught this largely by example (Heb. 13:7,17). With regard to generosity, there are two principles we must keep in mind. The first is that we are commanded to give freely because we have received freely. Further, as we give freely, more will be given. Give and it will be given to you. The second principle is that if we have any concerns about how the people (for whom we are responsible) are giving, we should look first at how we are giving. Are they tight-fisted? Well, are we? The second principle is that leadership is fundamentally by example. Suspicion with regard to their gifts will result in them giving to us suspiciously. There is no better way to set envy in motion than this. There is no better way to fight envy than by setting an example of open-handed generosity.

Second, churches and established ministries should be constantly on guard against their temptation to try to manage the Spirit. But the Spirit blows where He wishes (John 3:8), and this is not always kind to our budget cycles. The Spirit works through donations as much as through prayer. To assign the Spirit’s work to some kind of upper level, and to keep our financial principles down below according to “accepted accounting principles” is a form of gnosticism. Keeping an area where we can “manage it” is yet another form of not trusting God, which was addressed earlier.

And last, financial accountability is crucial. It is essential (2 Cor. 8:18-20). Openness to the Spirit’s leading in donations is not code for “no accountability.” Rather, it recognizes that accountability assumes the answer to a particular question, one that we should all ask more regularly than we do. That question is by what standard? Biblical accountability does include some elements that every bookkeeper learns while getting a business degree at Babylon State U. Honest weights and measures are something that even unbelievers want, and Scripture requires that as well (Prov. 20:10). So there is overlap. But biblical accountability also requires open-hearted, open-handed generosity (Matt. 10:8). This kind of generosity is not setting accountability aside; it is one of the central things we are being held accountable to do.

And in order to cultivate this kind of open-handedness, both in and out, we are to be focused on what we want to give, and be completely open to any Spirit-led saint who wants to help us give it.