David Skeel: Caught in the thicket

David Skeel is a professor of corporate law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a Presbyterian Church in America elder, and a God’s World Publications board member. He is the author of Icarus in the Boardroom, Debt’s Dominion, and The New Financial Deal: Understanding the Dodd-Frank Act and Its (Unintended) Consequences. His most recent book is True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World. Here are edited excerpts of our interview in front of Patrick Henry College students.

Your mom was a teacher, your dad an Air Force doctor: What were they as churchgoers? My parents both came from churchgoing families that didn’t fully internalize their faith. They went to church because that’s what people did. When my parents got married and started moving around with the military, they just stopped going to church. I was in a church three or four times the first 18 years of my life: no religious background at all. I went to the University of North Carolina. I had jumped through all the hoops I was supposed to be jumping through and had this deep sense that there had to be more to existence than what I was seeing in my life. That started me down the road to thinking about Christianity.

You majored in English. We read lots of books with biblical themes. I never knew what the themes were because I had never been to Sunday school class. We read a short story by Wright Morris, “The Ram in the Thicket”—I had no idea what the subtext of the story was. After enduring a class where I felt really ignorant, I decided to read the Bible. The summer after my sophomore year in college a couple of friends and I drove a van across the country. I started reading the Bible in the back of the van, and by the time I’d gotten a few chapters into Genesis I was persuaded it was true. I had never read anything so beautiful, so psychologically real.

‘Truth can’t be conveyed in a single genre, so the Bible’s mix of genres, language, and images is part of the evidence for its veracity.’

Muslims tend to dislike Genesis because the heroes are often not particularly heroic. I had precisely the opposite experience. When I read about Abraham, when I read about Noah, when I read about Joseph, I said, “I know these people.” God is using real people in history. Any book that doesn’t look like the world we inhabit I don’t find compelling. The flaws made it real to me, and that’s still a big part of what makes it real—that Peter renounced Jesus, when before he was willing to give up his life for Jesus. Those are people I understand. I guess, intuitively, at a very early age I had a sense of my own sin and the sin of people around me. Seeing that portrayed in a complex way I found very powerful and very real.

Christianity impressed you because it’s complicated? Absolutely. The psychological complexity of Christianity was really powerful for me, as was the complexity of the language in the Bible. Truth can’t be conveyed in a single genre, so the Bible’s mix of genres, language, and images is part of the evidence for its veracity.

The Bible’s different genres and writers also make Muslims distrust it: They prefer one writer and the one genre of the Quran, speechifying. Unity rather than diversity. Another of the really compelling things about the Bible, for me, is that it actually has both. That Jesus is both man and God, that God is one God but also three persons, reinforces the Bible’s complexity and truth.

Once you read the Bible and believed it’s true—what happened next? Friends and I went to a series of talks about the gospel designed for fraternity and sorority students. One of my roommates turned to me and said, “You don’t actually believe this stuff, do you?” I said, “I do.” To identify publicly with Jesus, even in this trivial, small way, was absolutely life-changing for me. I had no idea why I said that—I didn’t think I was a Christian at that point. But when I said “I do,” it was like being married. That moment I married Jesus and I knew that that was for good—that my life was changed and it would never be the same.

Since you emphasize the complexity of Christianity, I suspect you’re not thrilled when you see descriptions of the Bible as an “operator’s manual for planet Earth.” I wrote True Paradox because I found it really frustrating to hear biblical Christianity and Christians described in a way that had nothing to do with my faith and what Christianity is. In our culture Christianity is often characterized as simplistic. This book is for people who think there’s no reason to take Christianity seriously. It’s to show people of that sort—they surround me in my professional life—that Christianity is much more plausible than they think.

I should ask you about the last book you wrote in your professional capacity. What is Dodd-Frank and why should anyone care? That’s the giant piece of financial legislation put in place in 2010: It’s 2,319 pages long and has completely restructured the way we regulate banks and other financial institutions. When you hear about big banks and proposals to break them up, those are conversations about the Dodd-Frank act.

Has it done any good? It’s a real mixed bag. It introduces some regulation of derivatives and other financial contracts. That’s pretty good. Other parts of it are not good at all. It created a form of corporatism, which is the way in Europe corporations tend to be regulated. The underlying principle is we’ll allow these giant institutions to exist as long as they do what the government wants.

Will it prevent us from again having a debacle like that of 2008? It was sold as bringing an end to taxpayer bailouts: That’s what President Obama said when he signed it. Dodd-Frank sets up a lot of rules designed to stop bailouts, to limit what the Federal Reserve can do. None of those will work, at the end of the day. If we have a big crisis with a big bank, the Federal Reserve can bail it out if it wants to. That’s likely to be what happens. I would not say it’s safe to rest assured that there will never be another crisis like 2008. I don’t think one is on the horizon now, but it’s possible.

Do your last two books—on Dodd-Frank and on Christianity—have a common denominator: Law doesn’t settle our problems? The theme that underlies important parts of both of them is that law can’t save us. We have a temptation to think that if we just put the right laws in place we can prevent financial crises and we can solve the moral problems of the country. History tells us, and the Bible tells us, that’s not possible. We need to be humble about what the secular law can do.