Rapture Fever

. . .
Xxvlll RAPTURE FEVER
In the second semester of my freshman year, I transferred to
the University of California, Riverside, which at the time was
the only four-year liberal arts college in the University of California
system. It did not add a graduate school for another four
years. I studied there, on and off, for the next dozen years,
taking my doctorate in 1972. But what changed me the most
was my realization in the second semester of my freshman year
that there had to be a Christian approach to economics. I realized
that free market economics is true and socialist economics
is not true. I knew that the Bible is true. Therefore, I concluded
that the Bible must have something unique to say about
economics.
I spent the next three years searching for someone who had
written on Christian economics. I found nothing. There was
nothing.z Today, three decades later, things are a lot better.
There are a few books that deal with Christian economics,
including a dozen written by me. There is even an Association
of Christian Economists, although its hundreds of members
rarely write explicitly Christian economics; rather, they are
Christians who write academically acceptable articles on topics
that are occasionally interesting to other Christians academicians.
But, in 1959, there was nothing.
There was also nothing in the other fields. No one was talking
about an explicitly Christian world-and-life view except a
handful of Dutch-American Calvinist scholars whose work was
unknown outside of Michigan. Henry Van Til’s Ch-istiun Concept
01 Culture appeared in 1959, but I did not come across it until
I enrolled at Westminster Theological Seminary a Calvinist
institution, in 1963. For a fundamentalist scholar, there was
nothing available in 1959. There was not even The Genesis Flood,
which appeared in 1961, and only because Calvinist scholar R.
2. The twice-monthly tabloid newspaper called Chrktian Economics was in f%ct a
humanist free market newspaper that was financed by a billionaire Calvinis~ J.
Howard Pew. There was no attempt by its writers to use the Bible to provide the
content of their economic opinions and analysis.