Begin from first principles. God is life; life is from God; but what is living grows; therefore, what is of God shows growth.
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Everything argues in favor of God’s being pro-growth, such that those who say, in some domain of good, that he favors limited or no growth, have the burden of proof. “In good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over” (Luke 6:38) is the language of someone who loves growth over stasis.
Begin from first principles. God is life; life is from God; but what is living grows; therefore, what is of God shows growth.
He wants the Church to grow, using an astonishing image to express the proportion: from a mustard seed, the size of the period at the end of this sentence, it is to grow to a tree the size of a house, a ratio of roughly 1 to 45,000.
God is light, but light spreads. To say, with the medievals, bonum diffusivum sui (Good spreads itself) is to say that what is good effects growth. When Jesus said, “I am come to cast fire on the earth” (Luke 12:49), He was yearning to consume, to spread, to overtake.
He wants each of us individually to flourish, that is, to grow and cause growth. Flowers have the purpose of producing other plants. A single flourishing dandelion is followed by a field of dandelions. He cuts back a good growing plant only so that it can grow riotously. (John 15:2)
He tells us to become like little children, that is, like those in the stage of life marked by the most dramatic growth, not “you must become like old folks in rocking chairs.”
In the parables, His multiples signify that the fruitfulness pleasing to Him is 30, 60, or 100-fold. (Mark 4:20) The no-growth man who fails to understand his Master by burying his talent is severely chastised. (Matthew 25:25)
His talent is taken away and given to the man who has many, since “to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away” – which is a principle of acceleration or deceleration. “At God’s pace” means to accelerate.
The most fruitful bush, soil, worker, yields a hundredfold. He says, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24) But the typical wheat plant has five stalks, and each stalk has 22 seeds, a ratio of 1 to 110. It is the ratio he placed in nature – and the formula, presumably, of a fruitful apostolate.
He likes dispersion, which is a prelude to growth. In his Great Commission (Matthew 28:19), Jesus told his disciples to disperse, and grow into nations. His Chosen People, dispersed from Jerusalem when the Romans destroyed it in 70 AD, grew to be great throngs throughout Europe. Hitler hated their growth. The wisdom of “the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.” (John 4:21) Any flock not restricted to a place is free to spread and to grow.
The Parable of the Talents by Willem de Poorter, c. 1640 [National Gallery, Prague]
Yes, spiritual growth is most important, but God is pro-growth too in honest human material prosperity. Hear the instinct of a good human heart in Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation:
The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God. . . .
Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.
A Christian must be better than the pagans who praised their gods by bringing cornucopias. After all, we wonder at Creation, which strictly is infinite growth.
Is the mandate, “Be fruitful and multiply,” for pro-creators, captured by the rule that two have no more than two? But they’d have no more multiplied themselves than the man returning one talent had multiplied his endowment. Suppose then an increasing population. But God cannot reasonably will an end without willing the means. It follows that material productivity, the economy, must also grow.
St. Irenaeus, writing in 180 A.D., tells of an older generation, who learned it directly from St. John the Evangelist, that Jesus said:
The days shall come wherein vines shall grow, each having ten thousand shoots and on one shoot ten thousand branches, and on one branch ten thousand tendrils, and on every tendril ten thousand clusters, and in every cluster ten thousand grapes, and every grape when it is pressed shall yield five and twenty measures of wine. . . .Likewise also. . .every grain of wheat shall yield five double pounds of white clean flour.
Scholars reject the attribution because, they say, it is fantastical. But airplanes and supercomputers in your pocket are fantastical. What language would you have used, to convey to farmers in 30 AD, what economists have called “The Great Enrichment,” that hockey-stick growth of modern free economies?
It doesn’t quite matter whether what St. Irenaeus conveyed is genuine. This great saint – and Christians then – clearly believed it was the sort of thing the Lord might say, that mad lover of fruitfulness and growth.
We insist on temperedness, balance, equilibrium, rightly so – but let’s be sure, never so as to exclude startling growth.
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