As indicated in prior blogs, each of the Arthur Stone novels (Marshland [1]and Peace at Battle Mountain[2]) involves an economic and legal problem, murder, and engagement with spiritual realities. In Peace at Battle Mountain, the spiritual reality is our human problem with what St. Augustine called “disordered love.” We love as primary things that are secondary and as secondary things that are primary. A good deal of the suffering and distortion of human flourishing we encounter in our lives and the lives of others involves just this problem.

In Peace at Battle Mountain, the aging and now retired managing partner of Winchester & Wells talks to the now middle-aged Arthur Stone about this problem:

Patrick decided to get to the point.

            “Arthur, you know that, for years and years, I was all in at the firm. I thought we were building something meaningful. I also felt I was doing something important and building an important reputation. I rarely worked less than seventy hours a week. For many years, I never even took a vacation. The law was my life.

            “I realized I was mistaken when Jeanie got sick so soon after I retired. The firm was important, but Jeanie and the children were more important. She rarely complained, but everything we planned to do in retirement never happened. I had my priorities mixed up.

            “You have been far more successful than I ever was. You are known throughout the nation. Most people think you are Texas’s best litigator and corporate attorney. It makes me proud every time I hear your name. But you are fifty now. Soon, your children will be grown. As you have said, the law is changing, and there is every possibility that what we know as Winchester & Wells might not survive the changes. I would hate to see you at seventy alone and thinking, It was not worth it.

            “I am an Irish Catholic. I still go to mass once a week. Our priest uses a message from St. Augustine in sermons at least once a year. It is about disordered love. Augustine felt that human beings love as primary, what are secondary things like power, success, possessions, and pleasure. In the process, we make love for God and other people secondary. Most of the world’s problems come from loving the wrong things too much or the right things too little

            “I would hate for you to chase crown of victory after crown of victory for another twenty years or so, only to end up alone and empty. Plenty of men and women do. I did. Your family is more important than winning another case or even 100 other cases. You are a wealthy man and do not need to show how good you are to anyone ever again. Right now, your family needs you. [3]

In his great work, “On Christian Doctrine,” St. Augustine puts it this way:

Living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things in the right order so that you do not love what is not to be loved or fail to love what is to be loved or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally. [4]

In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine bases his entire ethical theory on the Great Commandment, “You shall love the Lord that God with all your heart, and all the soul, and all your mind and your neighbor as your self (Matthew 22: 35-40; Mark 12:28-31; Luke 10: 25-28).In other words, a Christian is to order his or her affections toward God first and others second. Our love toward our neighbor is just a part of our love for God, now shown to God’s creation and all his creatures. Other human beings are part of that creation and art to be loved in the same way that God loved them and in Christ gave his life for them.

The duty to love others cannot be divorced entirely from our responsibility to communicate the gospel. Part of loving another person is to bring them into a vital connection with that God who is love and who loves his creation and every creature. This part of love is captured in the Great Commission. God does not ask Christians to share their faith out of ego, narcissism, or a desire for power. God desires Christians to share their faith because God is love and desires his creation and creatures to live with love for God and others.

One way we can distort our lives is by loving human beings, who ought to be loved for their own sake, as objects of our desire. This is one of the problems in Peace Battle Mountain. In particular, Lance DuFort is incapable of loving others except as vehicles for his own ambitions and desires. Others in the book suffer the same fate.

In the passage quoted above, Arthur Stone meets with his mentor, Patrick Armbruster, who gives him advice about organizing his love for his wife and family. Patrick is aware that human beings can worship their own work and accomplishments. He is fearful that Arthur is falling into this trap of distorted love.

Building a business, a church, or a nonprofit organization can be demanding. Those who undertake such an effort must love the organization that they are creating. As anyone who has had a career knows, it is easy to give a job or organization a kind of love that one should reserve for God and others. In particular, one’s family. I would say that I was guilty of this during my professional career. It is easy to love ourselves in our own ambitions to the exclusion of our love for others and God.

Peace at Battle Mountain is primarily about love. It is about distorted lives and the struggle we humans must engage in to re-order our loves properly. As pointed out, we find it easy to love ourselves. We find it harder to love God and others. We humans are naturally selfish, and the result of our natural selfishness is that we need to have these loves re-ordered by grace. It is a slow process. It doesn’t happen in an hour or a day. There may be a moment in which we sense that we are committed to re-ordering our loves and even making some progress and re-ordering our loves—but that reordering will take the rest of our lives.

Copyright 2024, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Alystair West, Marshland (Bloomington, IN: Westbow Press, 2023). The book is available on Amazon.

[2] Alystair West, Peace at Battle Mountain (Hunt, TX: Quansus, 2024). The book is available on Amazon.

[3] Peace at Battle Mountain, 171-172.

[4] St. Augustine, “On Christian Doctrine” Chapter 27 in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 1st Series Vol, 2 (Grand Rapids MI: Hendrickson, 1994).

Tomorrow evening, I will sign copies of my new novel, Peace at Battle Mountain, at a local bookstore in San Antonio.[1] All my novels involve a financial crime, murder, and a spiritual struggle. In the case of Peace at Battle Mountain, the central theme is love—our human propensity to love things as secondary that are primary and love things that are primary that are secondary. Instead of God and other people, we love secondary things. Of course, sex, pleasure, power, and money rank high among the things that we human beings tend to overvalue.

From a financial perspective, Peace at Battle Mountain involves misusing generally accepted accounting principles to create illusory profits. In my legal practice, more than once, I saw the susceptibility of people to invent reality, distorting their business’s financial reporting. One of the saddest things is when management begins to believe their distorted reality. This fatal misstep always ends in disaster. I’ve seen this happen more than once.

Unfortunately, with the advent of postmodernism and the loss of confidence in the reality of truth in Western civilization, the problem has become even more serious. In my judgment, some of the most recent financial disasters reflect the most profound danger of a Nietzschean way of thinking – a group of so-called “supermen and superwomen” develop a highly complex financial strategy divorce from reality in which they can make a lot of money on the front end.  Of course, these people have little or no concern for those damaged by their behavior.

This is part of the decline of Judeo-Christian Christianity in the West. In Peace at Battle Mountain, one of the characters describes the problem this way:

“Unfortunately, no one was paying much attention to where this was all leading. In this enthusiasm, accountants turned a blind eye to lousy accounting that did not reflect reality. Analysts on Wall Street ignored difficulties in financial reports. Money center banks loaned money for marginal transactions. Lawyers created vehicles for transactions that lacked financial reality. This was especially true at E-Titan. Lance used his contacts on Wall Street to grow E-Titan at astronomical rates—growth rates that no serious investor should have believed. But they did. Everyone forgot the old maxim, ‘If it is too good to be true, it isn’t.’

“Years later, one of the architects of the final growth of E-Titan (its lead trader) put it this way, “Postmodernism is popular on college campuses these days. One principle of postmodernism is that human beings can and do create reality through language. That is what we did at E-Titan. Accounting rules and financial statements involve the language of mathematics. We made the mistake of believing that we could just create our own reality and that whatever that reality was would one day be real. We didn’t stop to think that it would come crashing down on us all since it wasn’t true. The question was never ‘if.’ The question was always ‘when.’ We were just too arrogant to see it coming.

“I remember Brad Gilliland telling me one day, as we created another Cheetah and took more assets and debt off our balance sheet, ‘I think we might be forgetting that when Judgment Day arrives, everyone will have to go to cash accounting. That includes E-Titan.’ I didn’t remember Brad saying that until Judgment Day arrived—at least as it pertained to E-Titan.

“We thought we were supermen. We were making all these trades, and we were making big money. Our bonuses were huge. Who cared about the accounting? Who cared about the financial statements? Who cared about the pension plans investing in our stock or the fate of those leaving E-Titan stock to their aging spouses? Somewhere along the line, we lost our moral bearings. “After a time, we began believing our Lance DuFort-created false reality. We came to believe that the illusions created by mark-to-market accounting were true. (Or, maybe we just wanted to believe it was true, or we would not have been able to live with ourselves.) Here is the bitter truth: after E-Titan failed, and the bankruptcy lawyers and managers reconstructed and restated all the transactions, they became convinced that E-Titan never made much money on a continuing basis. It was all smoke and mirrors.” [2]

Here, we have depicted a sad truth in the form of a novel. In most of the financial crises of my lifetime, driven by greed, someone or some group created an alternative reality that was divorced from economic accuracy. Accounting only works if those preparing the financial statements and later auditing them use accounting principles to reflect reality. It is not just a matter of “following the rules.” It’s a matter of morality and judgment. No series of regulations or laws can protect people from financial misdeeds.

One of the points made in Marshland and Peace at Battle Mountain is the consequences of the dubious use of mark-to-market accounting. In the case of the savings and loan crisis, market accounting allowed savings and loans to ignore losses for long periods. In the case of E-Titan and similar situations, mark-to-market accounting was used to show profits that did not exist. In both cases, management and accounting firms were “following the rules” but also manipulating those rules in ways that were simply inappropriate. In some cases, they were breaking the law. In all cases, reality came crashing down on the perpetrators sooner or later.

The Arthur Stone novels are not designed to keep me busy and retirement. I’m trying to say something that I think is important to our society and its stability. It’s vital for our children and our grandchildren and their happiness. It is essential for the stability of our political system. It is crucial for the stability of our economic system. It is critical to the strength of our families and neighborhoods: The excessive, narcissistic individualism that America breeds is unhealthy. It leads to all kinds of dysfunctions, both personal and social. Our educational system, the media, the government, and, most recently, economic businesses reinforce this. This means we can’t have a stable society without the ultimate values that are wisely and carefully applied to every area of life.

Copyright 2024, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Alystair West, Peace at Battle Mountain (Hunt, Texas: Quansus, 2024). The book can be purchased at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other outlets. The electronic version is not yet available due to the author’s lack of competence.

[2] Id, 150-151.

Last weekend, Kathy and I had the opportunity to provide some leadership for a retreat focused on the Apha program of our church. For those unfamiliar with Alpha, it is an introduction to the Christian faith that originated in the church of England at a congregation called Holy Trinity-Brompton. Over the past many years, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, and many churches use it to disciple people into the Christian faith.

One thing that I like about Alpha is the format of the program. Over 12 weeks or so, the group meets weekly to have dinner together, listen to a video, talk together at a small table, share questions, and eventually pray. Just before the program is over, there is a weekend retreat in which the primary subject is the Holy Spirit. It is an opportunity for people to get away from their day-to-day lives and experience God in a new and different way.

The program’s structure is a contemporary embodiment of the description of the first Christians in Jerusalem after Pentecost:

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day, they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the people’s favor. And the Lord added to their number daily those being saved (Acts 2:42-46).

Our local church was willing to underwrite the weekend, so we had people from various socioeconomic groups, races, creeds, and ethnicities. We had people from independent Bible church backgrounds, charismatic, Presbyterian Church backgrounds, and more. We had people who were part of a new church development and the oldest congregation in San Antonio. We had people who were part of an intercity ministry for youth, including some youth. It was a wonderfully diverse group of Christians and seekers.

Community as Opposed to Individualism

On Friday night, not everyone was in attendance, so we were able to sit around and talk with people with him we would ordinarily not be paired. It was a wonderful experience! One of those in attendance had read my book Crisis of Discipleship. [1] In the group, he asked: “I know that you discussed the barriers to Christian faith in America, but what do you think is the most significant barrier?” It took me a moment to answer.

Those who read Crisis of Discipleship know that I analyzed our culture and some of the things that make it difficult for the Christian faith to penetrate contemporary society. I am also against the simplistic reduction of complex phenomena to simple solutions. In response to the question, I chose to say that the fundamental issue is our implicit materialism. Most people live based on an outdated idea of what the world is like. We automatically think of the world in terms of physical bodies and forces acting upon those bodies. We automatically think that we are one of the bodies and should participate in carefully managing the forces upon us. The search for affluence, money, power, pleasure, and individual security is almost automatic in such a society.

Those who have read Crisis of Discipleship know that another factor plays a significant role in the problem of Christian discipleship in contemporary America: our excessive individualism. The church is a community of believers. Evangelism and discipleship are essential activities of the entire body of Christ as it lives out its witness to Christ and God in whatever place it exists. In other words, evangelism is not individualistic. It is essentially communitarian. It is an activity of the entire Body of Christ.

The Mission of Christ as a Mission of the Church

Furthermore, the Mission of God, sometimes called “Missio Dei” in Latin, is not the business of specialized people or groups. It’s an activity in which the entire church should be involved merely because of its existence. Contemporary churches talk a lot about missions, forgetting that the first and primary mission is given to us in the Great Commission. We are to go into all the world and make disciples (Matthew 28:16). This is God’s mission to his people.

Everything else we do, such as education, medical care, providing clean water, building churches, and supporting colleges and universities, is simply part of the church’s mission to share God’s love with others and bring the entire world into fellowship with the Living God. No one person can do this alone; it’s the activity of the whole church.

The great missiologist Lesslie Newbiggin once observed that a church without a mission is not a church. [2] It is a statement about the condition of the American church, that so many people found this statement revolutionary. It wasn’t revolutionary in the least. Newbigin simply stated what the church was intended to be by Christ has been through the centuries and will be in the future.

The Importance of the Local Congregation

If the primary mission of the church is to share the good news of Jesus Christ and the coming of God’s kingdom into the world and make disciples who are members of that kingdom, and if that commission is to be carried out in community, then the local church gains a new and central importance in the mission of God. The church is not an accidental collection of people. It’s not a social organization, like the PTA, formed for a particular purpose. It is not merely a place where people meet to hear a nice talk and listen to the music of their choice. It is the living embodiment of Christ and his kingdom amid the world. The church is not incidental to the proclamation of the gospel. It is central. It is that manifestation of the kingdom of God into which people are brought to live out their lives in community with others.

Copyright 2024, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] G. Christopher Scruggs, Crisis of Discipleship: Renewing the Art of Relational Disciple-Making Rev, Ed. (Richmond, VA: Living Dialogue Ministries, 2024).

[2] Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission Rev. Ed. (Grand Rapids, Mi: William B. Eerdmans, 1978, 19950, 2.