With Thanksgiving fast approaching, I think it would be a good idea to take a look at thankfulness. What should we be thankful for? Are there things we should not be thankful for? In previous articles I’ve insinuated that material prosperity is not necessarily a blessing. Should we nevertheless be thankful for it?

Note that the first and last beatitudes are for those without any claim to prosperity. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 5:2), and “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10). These are blessings which preclude the rich (one would assume that the persecuted generally forfeit their wealth). Obviously there is a special blessing for the poor, but is that a complement to a blessing of wealth, or is wealth not a blessing at all?

The first thing to realize here is that there is never a shortage of blessing for the elect. “We know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). We have seen that this promise is not for material means at all, but a promise that any and all circumstances will cause the believer to be in the long run drawn closer to God. Likewise it is not a promise that one will lack material means. Neither richness nor poverty can come between God and His elect.

Essentially we are as Christians called to be completely agnostic to our material circumstances: our behavior and attitudes are constant regardless of our means. Paul makes this point in Phillipians 4:11-12: “I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need”.

There is an important difference between contentedness and thankfulness. There is a sense in which we are told not to be thankful, because it reveals in us a hypocritical heart:

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank Thee that I am not like other men–extortionists, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess’. But the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.
-Luke 18.10-14

What is interesting here is that the Pharisee is thankful, and the tax collector, whom we can assume to be relatively wealthy (it was a rather lucrative job), makes no mention of thanks. Yet the Pharisee was condemned, while the tax collector was justified. Why?

Thankfulness is the valuation for something on its own merit. “Thank you that I am not like other men” is thankfulness, but it is also pride. Closer to home, “Thank you for the raise I just got” is thankfulness, but it is also materialism. Truly the pharisee was not like other men, and surely God has given the raise, but these are rather things we are to be content in: thankful for the true blessing that the circumstance provides (Romans 8:28), but with the realization that these things themselves are not the blessing - rather a means to a blessing - as a vehicle by which God works good for His elect. Contentedness is a disconnected thankfulness - being wealthy as if one were not wealthy - “dealing with the world as if you had no dealings with it” (1 Corinthians 7:29-31). This is the spirit of the tax collector: he knew his wealth meant nothing were he to forfeit his own soul as a result (Mark 8:36). God had given him the wealth, but was it a blessing in itself? Or was it a blessing in the sense that it at some point caused him to cry out to God “Be merciful to me, a sinner!”?

This is the sense in which we are to be thankful: not for the circumstance in itself, but for the circumstance in its God-crafted goal, whether or not we know how that goal plays out through the circumstance. We are thus not to pray “Thank you, God, for a good family and plenty to eat” (if these things are true), but “Thank you, God, for a family that has encouraged my faith, and sustenance with which I may devote my energies back to You”. Not “Thank you, God, for placing me in a country with political freedom and free of persecution”, but “Thank you, God, that You have made the Gospel available to me through the means of political freedom”. God works good to those whom He has called both in prosperity and poverty, and over all the things we possess, this is the blessing we are to be thankful for.

The description of the Trinity in the Athanasian Creed was frustrating for me for a long time. What does it mean to say that there is one God with three Persons? It’s all well and good to say “eternally begotten”, but it’s almost a senseless phrase. In fact, the whole creed is full of concepts that make very little sense on their own: without explanation, it’s a very unhelpful way to think about the Trinity.

Fortunately, there is explanation. Justin Martyr, regarding the phrase “eternally begotten”, writes:

We see things happen similarly among ourselves, for whenever we utter some word, we beget a word–yet, not by any cutting of, which would diminish the word in us when we utter it.

Eternally Begotten is thus a reference to John 1:1. So in the (rough) spirit of the Athanasian Creed, I present a series of logically progressive points connecting the creed through Justin Martyr’s explanation to John 1:1, and then to other points on the nature of Jesus.

In the beginning was the word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.
-John 1:1-4

On the relationship of Jesus to The Father
1: “The Word” in John 1:1-4 refers to Jesus Christ, the son of God.

2: Jesus Christ may be thought of as eternally begotten of the Father, as a word may be begotten by its speaker.

3: Jesus Christ may be thought of as the only begotten son of the Father (John 3:16) in that He represents the entirety of the Word of God, first in that He fulfills the Word which had previously existed in law (Matthew 5:17), and second in that He is that word incarnate (John 1:1).

——

On the relationship of Jesus to creation
4: The thoughts of God are innumerably vast (Psalm 139:17-18). God being unchanging can be thought of as having knowledge rather than thoughts insofar as thoughts are changing and sovereign thoughts are brought to pass.

5: Creation exists as the result and herald of the glory of God, in that it is the perfect display of all the attributes of God (Psalm 19:1-6).

6: This glory is displayed in the exemplification of the attributes of God: goodness (Psalm 107:1), from which spring both holy justice (Hebrews 9:22) and loving mercy (Romans 5:8).

7: Salvation is the perfect exemplification of all of these attributes: justice and mercy both satisfied in a single act.

8: This being the case, all of creation is centered around the singular act of the salvation of mankind.

9: This being the case and Jesus Christ being the agent of that salvation, Jesus Christ is the incarnation of the entirety of the thoughts, knowledge, and Word of God with regard to mankind.

——

On the relationship of Jesus to the believer
10: We being adopted as sons of God of whom Christ is the firstfruits, are therefore intended as the embodiment of the Word of God in some respect.

11: Sanctification is the process by which we, becoming more Christlike, come to embody the Word of God.

Barack Obama led the popular vote by 7% on November 4. A hefty margin for sure in a presidential race, but nothing at all compared to the electoral vote turnout: a good 37% margin. And except with rare occasions where the granularity of the state system falls on the other side of a close race (i.e., the 2000 election), electoral vote margins are almost always starkly amplified over the popular vote margin. Why is this, and what does it tell us about markets?

Earlier I wrote about Efficient Market Theory and its shortcomings in failing to describe overweighted information in stock prices. The example used there was horse betting, but the electoral college is also a great, and much more accessible example, whose design highlights the way information may become overweighted.

The key to this overweightedness hinges on the fact that the popular vote is not a probability. A 53%-46% spread does not mean that John McCain has a 46% chance of winning. As a matter of fact, if we are to look at the electoral college as a measure of the probability of either candidate winning, John McCain was severely overrepresented in the college with respect to the poll numbers. If supporters of McCain and Obama were homogeneously distributed throughout the country, even a 1% edge in the popular vote would give Obama the entire college. In a winner-take-all system, a few points (the margin of error) away from 50% in the polls and probability of a win drops precipitously.

The exact same effect can be observed in the House and Senate with regard to party control and vote outcomes. Each additional Democratic congressman shifts the aggregate passed legislature 0.45% in the House and 0.63% in the Senate in the liberal direction, according to one measure of such things (Stimson, 2008) - until the halfway point. The single congressman that gives the Democrats control of Congress carries with him a 48.9% shift in policy in the House, and a 34.8% shift in the Senate (conversely, the same is true for Republican control in the opposite direction). Legislation, like the presidency, is winner-take-all, and the only probability that matters is at the margin when the proportion is 50%.

Predictions in the stock market are similarly boolean, in that investors decide whether a particular stock will return a profit or a loss over the course of their investment. They are not interested in how it meanders up and down along the way except insofar as that represents a trend upwards or downwards - at least no more than the popular vote matters to the election. A stock price carries no more information about the future performance of that stock than the electoral college contains about the popular vote: it too is not a probability. And also like the electoral college, these predictions influence the outcome. Buying a stock on the expectation of a positive return will cause its price to rise, just as casting a vote for a candidate will increase his popular vote proportion. Finally, a stock in price/earnings equilibrium (that is, when all information is present and weighted optimally) can be thought of as at the 50% margin with regard to gains vs. losses, in that, according to Efficient Market Theory, its price is equally likely to go up or down depending on news - basically, any news while the stock is at equilibrium is that last senator that pushes the stock into positive or negative territory.

Stock movement is thus decided at the margin, where the expectation boolean is determined. If enough stock is sold at once in a particular company because of a bad piece of news, the stock price drops and the boolean turns negative, which tells people that the expected earnings no longer justify the (original) price - it will generate a loss with respect to the overall market if bought at the current price. But this triggers more people sell while they have the chance, and before long, the negative data has driven the price down to where it is justified by the new expected earnings. Just like the electoral college, a company need only move a few points down from price/earnings equilibrium to initiate a precipitous drop in stock price.