We’ve been talking about how God created the entire world — the entire universe — as something to reflect his own beauty and his own glory back to him. And we’ve seen that, as the pinnacle of that creation, God made humanity, and that he said something very special about us: that we are made in his image. Part of what that means, as we’ve been discovering, is that humanity is meant to cultivate God’s creation, to exercise dominion over it, to bring it more and more in line with his character and his attributes — to show, better and better, what he is like.
This isn’t a task for one generation only. It’s something that happens across every human generation, more and more. Humans spread out across the world, and they find new ways to cultivate all of these wonderful and beautiful resources and scenes and activities that God has given us, in order to display more and more what he is like and how we reflect him. In this talk I want to take that idea — image-bearing through dominion and culture — and press it right up against the question this whole series is circling: what does any of it have to do with money, and with Bitcoin?
Made for work, not for idleness
Once again I want to lean on the Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck, who has helped me so much in thinking about what it means to live in God’s world. He puts this teaching — that God created man in his image — very plainly. Man, he says, was not created to sit still, but to go out and work:
Man was not created for idleness but for work. He was not allowed to rest upon his laurels, but had to go straight into the wide world in order to subdue it to the power of his word and his will.
Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God
Bavinck says that mankind was given a big, a widely distributed, a rich task on the earth — an assignment that would cost us centuries of effort to accomplish. God pointed man in a direction incalculably far away, a direction he had to take and to pursue all the way to the very end. And the goal of that long labor is nothing less than the displaying of God himself:
The image of God had to be spread to the ends of the earth and had to be impressed upon all the works of men’s hands. Man had to cultivate the earth so that it would more and more become a revelation of God’s attributes.
Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God
So this is the picture: image-bearing isn’t a static thing we simply possess and protect. It’s a vocation. We are to take the raw material of God’s good world and work it, develop it, cultivate it — and as we do, the works of our hands are meant to bear God’s image too, more and more becoming a revelation of who he is.
What does this have to do with money?
So what does all of this have to do with technology? What does it have to do with that specific form of technology we call money? And what does it have to do with Bitcoin?
Bavinck’s point — which we’ve now heard in a couple of different ways — is that to bear God’s image is to seek out and to use the good products of human cultivation: our technology, our culture, the works of our hands. And for our purposes here, that includes seeking out and using better money. Money is one of humanity’s oldest and most far-reaching technologies, and like every other human work it can either reflect God’s character or obscure it. So one real, concrete way to bear God’s image faithfully is to care about whether the money we use is honest or dishonest, just or unjust.
And here at Magnalia we think Bitcoin is good money. We think it’s better money than most of what we’ve had for at least the last hundred years — and arguably it’s the best money that human beings have ever come up with. Not because it’s an idol to be worshiped, but because, in some genuinely wonderful ways, it reflects God’s own attributes.
Honest money for an honest God
Think about what God is like. He is honest. He is reliable. He is trustworthy. He is faithful to do what he has said he will do. And a good money will, in its own small and creaturely way, echo those very qualities.
Bitcoin is an honest money. It’s a trustworthy money. It’s predictable. In a sense, you could even say it is faithful — faithful to what it has promised to be, just as God himself is honest and reliable and faithful to his word. It operates fundamentally by openness and clarity, rather than hiding behind a veil of who happens to be in power and who gets to decide what counts as money.
It also comes to us by way of actual work. Contrast that with the kind of money most of the world uses today — what we call fiat currency, money that can be printed at will simply because someone in power declares that it is now money. Bitcoin doesn’t arrive by bare declaration; it arrives through the work of those who labor to find it and to spread it. It isn’t a prideful attempt to get something for nothing. Fiat money, by contrast, is finally based on pride — on bare declaration, on power alone. Bitcoin comes by effort, and not by the ability of the mighty to overpower the weak, to push them around, and to tell them how things must be.
A system built to lose value
The system of fiat money we’ve lived with for around a hundred years — and which arguably got considerably worse about fifty years ago — is, I think, well-intentioned in many ways. But it is fundamentally designed to lose its value over time, because it cannot operate without inflation. It cannot function unless money is printed over and over and over again.
That has consequences for the kind of people we become. The entire fiat monetary system encourages debt and rewards very short-term thinking, while it quietly discourages the very things the Bible commends — saving, long-term planning, thinking across multiple generations. The wisdom literature of Scripture treats those habits as fundamental to what it means to fear God and to live wisely before him. But a system built to lose value over time, by going deeper and deeper into debt and printing more money on the strength of nothing but a declaration that it is valuable “because I’m the one in power” — that kind of system trains us out of wisdom and into folly.
Rent-seeking and the Cantillon effect
A system like this also tempts people to take advantage of it. If money flows from those in power, then the rational move is to situate yourself as close as you can to the people who set fiscal policy, who decide how money is spent, who run the programs and the agencies that hand the new money out. Economists have a name for this: rent-seeking. Instead of creating value, you maneuver yourself nearer and nearer to the source of policy and the source of new money, in order to benefit yourself and your friends the most — and to spread the cost out across everyone else, in such a way that they never quite notice what’s happening to them. Enormous amounts of time and resources get wasted as a small number of people prosper by their proximity to power, while the bill is quietly distributed to the many.
None of this is new. This has always been a problem — it’s not something invented in the last fifty or hundred years. The Bible speaks to it again and again. The Old Testament prophets repeatedly criticize the powerful people around them for doing exactly this sort of thing. The prophet Micah especially zeroes in on the way the powerful use their position to trample the poor — people who own a little property and simply want to pass it on to their children and their grandchildren.
But it becomes drastically worse once money can simply be printed, and once government programs and wars are run largely on debt. Then you don’t merely have rent-seeking. You also have what’s called the Cantillon effect: those who are situated closest to the money printer — closest to the people who create money out of nothing — benefit far more, because they receive the new money first. You and your friends get the freshly created money before everyone else has even caught up to the fact that there is suddenly a great deal more of it sloshing around in the system. By the time the rest of the world notices, the advantage has already been spent.
Better money as faithful image-bearing
Human technology can be turned to great evil. But God wants us to use it for good — to use it to reflect him and to honor him. That is part of what it means to bear his image more and more faithfully. And here is part of the wonder and the beauty of the human family: image-bearing looks different across the ages, even as the essential nature of man itself never changes. Humans have been developing, inventing, and discovering different forms of money all through our history, and some of them have been more God-honoring and God-reflecting than others.
We happen to live in a period characterized by money that is unfair, unjust, and dishonest — money that harms the poor and the disconnected most of all. And so, precisely as God’s image-bearers, we ought to seek out and use better money. We at Magnalia are convinced that Bitcoin is better money — that it is, in fact, the best money human beings have yet developed.
But better money cannot be the end of the story. In the next couple of talks we’re going to see that we can’t simply stop at having better money, or even the best money. Human technology and human dominion are meant to lead somewhere higher — they are meant to lead to worship. And that’s exactly where we’ll go next, as we turn to one of the most startling scenes in the Gospels and ask: why was Jesus so angry at the money-changers?