If money cannot buy happiness, far less can it buy salvation and life. It is God’s righteousness, not wealth, that turns the key of heaven’s gates. “Wealth is worthless in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death … Whoever trusts in his riches will fall, but the righteous will thrive like a green leaf” (Prov. 11:4, 28).

When my grandmother sold her 1976 Toyota Corona in 1996, the sun visors and doors were still covered with the protective plastic from the factory. The car’s original green paint was brilliant and immaculate, and it had been serviced within an inch of its life. In fact, when it rained Grandma had to go out with raincoat and umbrella because Grandad didn’t want to risk rusting their beautiful car.
It wasn’t just the car. Grandma only ever owned one electric toaster, a 1948 wedding present. It had flip down doors on either side, and you had to manually turn the bread. She only ever used one carving knife the one her blacksmith grandfather had repurposed, using forge and hammer from a worn-out steel file in the early 1900s.
In her last years, in the blazing Perth summers, she still cooled herself using a damp towel and electric fan, reluctant to waste electricity on her perfectly good split-system air conditioner.
Grandma was born in 1926, and so she lived her girlhood through the Great Depression. Her family had no car or cart, and they traveled by foot or bus. Her father, a school master, supplemented the family table by hunting rabbits. Her mother had to sell her beloved piano to buy food: “We ate the piano,” Grandma would sometimes say. Butter was scarce, and drippings on bread with salt and pepper made a frequent meal. (Dripping was the fat from a cooked roast, collected into used tins.) Grandma, like just about every other Australian in the 1930s, had to live frugally, and she never lost those childhood habits. She treasured and looked after every possession.
How different my life has been. I have had many cars, and I haven’t looked after any of them especially well. Cheap electric appliances come and go. My worn-out clothes are discarded instead of repaired. Every now and then we have to clear uneaten leftovers out of the fridge. If it’s cold, we put on the heater without much thought.
By any standard of history and place, the Australian middle class enjoys spectacular wealth. And with wealth comes wastage, greed, forgetfulness of the poor, pride, a sense of entitlement, and spiritual apathy.
These are not small dangers. And so we turn urgently to God’s word for help and guidance. Here are seven things the book of Proverbs teaches us about poverty and wealth, riches and want.
1.  Wealth comes from the Lord.
“The blessing of the LORD brings wealth” (Prov. 10:22). If God is sovereign, if he governs all creation, then both riches and poverty come ultimately from him. Poor and barren Hannah recognized this: “The LORD sends poverty and wealth; he humbles and he exalts” (1 Sam. 2:7; Scripture quotes from NIV version unless otherwise noted). And Moses warned rich Israelites never to forget this:

You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth. (Deut. 8:17)

Godliness and riches are linked: “Humility is the fear of the LORD; its wages are riches and honor and life” (Prov. 22:4). Psalm 112 concurs:

Praise the Lord.
Blessed are those who fear the Lord,
    who find great delight in his commands.
Their children will be mighty in the land;
    the generation of the upright will be blessed.
Wealth and riches are in their houses,
    and their righteousness endures forever. (Ps. 112:1-3)

In a fallen world, however, the correlation is far from robust. The godly can be destitute (like Hannah, Job in his trials, Elijah, and Mary), and the godless can be rich (like Pharaoh, Nabal, Darius, and the glutton who pretended Lazarus didn’t exist). The rich should not presume that God smiles on them, nor should the poor assume that he frowns on them.
2. The Lord normally bestows wealth by hard work, frugality, and saving.
“Dishonest money dwindles away, but he who gathers money little by little makes it grow” (Prov. 13:11). “All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty” (Prov. 14:23). “The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty” (Prov. 21:5).
And so indolent epicureans tend to impoverish themselves: “He who loves pleasure will become poor; whoever loves wine and oil will never be rich” (Prov. 21:17). “He who works his land will have abundant food, but the one who chases fantasies will have his fill of poverty” (Prov. 28:19).
Some will inherit the benefits of the hard work, frugality, and saving of others. “Houses and wealth are inherited from parents” (Prov. 19:14a). The godly will want this for their children: “A good man leaves an inheritance for his children’s children, but a sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous” (Prov. 13:22). A patrimony does not however come without its dangers: “An inheritance quickly gained at the beginning will not be blessed at the end” (Prov. 20:21).
3. Greed is evil.
Gordon Gecko, the fictional Wall Street swindler, urged that “greed is good.” Scripture urges instead that greed is godless.
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Written by J.C. Scharl |
Friday, December 8, 2023

Paradise Lost could be a parable for our strange days: when devilry goes hand in hand with almost god-like technological achievement, when the highest-ever standard of living accompanies skyrocketing suicide rates, and when nations stockpile unbelievable wealth while strategically eliminating the vulnerable. It is well worth our time to return to this startling epic because it has the ability to prepare us to discern what comes from the humble heart of God, and what is marked—however splendidly—with the sign of the Devil.

I’ve been rereading Milton’s Paradise Lost. I am not alone in this; earlier this year, every time I checked Twitter, someone was commenting on Paradise Lost. There seemed to be a gravitational pull toward Milton’s epic. Many people, from Jaspreet Singh Boparai at The Critic to Ed Simon at LitHub, found themselves commenting on this very old poem—and not just the poem, but the concepts of good and evil, the nation, and the very possibility of virtue in a world like ours.
This is not a coincidence. We are living through a strange time. It is not unprecedented, despite the insistence of countless recent writers to the contrary, but it is undeniably very strange. It is a time in which a father is using his son’s blood to chase immortality; nations create elaborate bureaucracies to eliminate individuals seen as less worthy; and online personalities singing unequivocal praises of the Greek Dark Ages attract tens of thousands of followers. In this time, in which humanity seems to exist in thrall to claims of youth, strength, and power, Milton’s strange poem is newly attractive and newly disturbing in equal parts. That, I believe, is no accident.
Milton’s poem has always been disturbing, and for one primary reason: his Satan. The Satan of Paradise Lost is a staggering invention. Far from the brutal, subrational tortured behemoth of Dante, Milton’s Satan is oddly appealing. He’s manly, assertive, creative. He’s compelling. He has a goal and he pursues it relentlessly. He refuses to submit to fate. He’s a powerful speaker and a visionary.
In a word, he’s heroic.
To read the first half of Paradise Lost is to find oneself admiring the Devil, and that is a disturbing place to be. It is so disturbing, in fact, that many readers claim that Milton has made a misstep somehow. William Blake wrote that Milton had to be “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” John Dryden, who believed that Milton had made Satan the hero of Paradise Lost, rewrote the poem in rhymed verse and “corrected” what he saw as Milton’s imaginative error; for decades, his translation was far more popular that Milton’s original.
In rereading the poem, I understand where Blake and Dryden are coming from. Milton manages to bring Satan very near our hearts in the poem; he speaks, as it were, to our longings and comports himself in the way we imagine a hero would.
This bothers people. It bothers me. I do not like that I admire the Devil for exemplifying certain virtues. If the courage, creativity, and indomitability we see in Milton’s Satan came from a character with any other name, I would find myself praising him.
The question becomes: Is this an imaginative failure on the part of the artist? Does Milton stumble here, lured by some darkness in his own vision into loading the Prince of Darkness with virtues? Or does he load his Devil with attractions intentionally, drawing us into this sympathetic relationship with darkness for some moral purpose of his own?
Types of Devils
Before we can answer that question, we must understand Milton’s Satan in its place in the tradition of Christian conceptions of the Devil. Leaving aside the medieval idea of the Devil as a fork-tailed, pitchfork-wielding monster whose toothy grin mocks fallen souls (an idea that may, for all I know, be the most accurate one we have), I want to look at the two other defining depictions of Satan in the contemporary Western imagination: Dante’s and C.S. Lewis’.
I will begin with Lewis’ because it is easiest for me to accept. Lewis is an Augustinian of the first order; he believes absolutely that evil is the negative of Good, and he demonstrates this in his writing by making evil always small, petty, gray, dull. Even his fiercest evils, like Tash in The Last Battle and the devils of That Hideous Strength, are shown to be pale, flaccid, and tasteless in comparison with goodness. In the comic essay “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” Lewis shows Hell as a nasty little place, and its bureaucracy consumed with petty details, squabbling over minute differences in the diabolic hierarchy.
In teasing out his Augustinian convictions to this degree, Lewis is following a thread plucked from Dante, whose Devil (“Emperor of the kingdom dolorous”) is bestial and gibbering. By having abandoned God, Dante asserts, the Devil has lost not only his own reflected beauty but even his mind. Virgil explains to Dante that the intellect is the light of God in the mind; by this reasoning, Hell includes the loss of intellect, language, and coherent thought.
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The woke-relevant typology is necessary to identify with whom you might be able to work to challenge the Woke juggernaut, as well as to identify Woke advocates and enablers before they become too powerful. In short, the Critical Social Justice perspective has been promoted and supported by those who adhere to and understand it (the Woke), as well as those broadly sympathetic to the cause but who don’t actually understand it (the Woke-proximate). 

The battle against wokeism, aka the Critical Social Justice perspective, is entering its third phase. The first phase involved sounding the alarm and drawing attention to this retrograde, caustic, atavistic, anti-modern, anti-liberal, anti-science and anti-scientific creed. The second phase whose end we are now approaching involved understanding, analyzing and describing to the public at large what characterizes the creed, where it comes from, its results and the extent to which it has captured our institutions. The third phase involves challenging the creed and recapturing our institutions. The beginning of this phase began in earnest in K-12 education with parents all across the US joining together to reclaim control over what their children are being taught. While doing so, lessons are being learned and shared. These experiments are essential to success. What has been missing is a unified presentation of the phenomenon, the strategies and tactics used to entrench it, and those that can be used to defend against it; in a word, a guide. The purpose of Counter Wokecraft is to play this role.
The focus of Counter Wokecraft is universities and academia. They are the focus since they are the origin of the Critical Social Justice perspective and its most avid and effective propagators. They are also the institutions with which I have the most experience and where I have observed the rapid advance of the doctrine in recent years. I believe that at this stage, the manual will be most useful to STEM disciplines defending against the Woke onslaught given the hegemony of the Critical Social Justice perspective in the fine arts, humanities and social sciences. Despite the focus on STEM disciplines in universities, I believe it can be easily adapted to other disciplines, milieux and institutions.
The manual itself comprises three parts: understanding Woke, the strategies and tactics of those advancing the Woke perspective (wokecraft), and how to protect against wokecraft.
Understanding Woke
Understanding Woke provides a description of the doctrine, its political project, as well as a woke-relevant typology of the different participants involved in making decisions at universities.
Understanding Critical Social Justice doctrine is essential to being able to defend against wokecraft for at least three reasons. The first is that the key axioms of the creed inform and help explain the strategies that are adopted to entrench and propagate it. The second is to help readers appreciate that while Wokeism appears to represent a bewildering number of different movements, the “movements” are all fundamentally rooted in a few axioms. Understanding the axioms therefore helps not only to demystify one particular movement, but all of them. Third, it is essential to prepare would-be dissidents to be able to respond to it.
The Woke political project needs to be understood since there is so much confusion around what the goal of the movement is. There are many reasons for this including the fact that so many advocates seem well-meaning, that its goals are intentionally obfuscated, and that many common words are confusingly re-appropriated to serve the Woke cause. In a nutshell, the Woke political project can be summarized as equity: the retributive redistribution of resources according to identity. The flow of the desired redistribution is from oppressor to oppressed identities, where identities are defined by skin color, primary sexual characteristics, sexual orientation, etc.
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