Ask a man to tell you about himself without mentioning what he does for a living, and he’ll struggle. Why? Because without work, we are lost. It’s not a punishment; it’s a gift from God. In it and through it, we discover our purpose and place in God’s creation. In this short, refreshing read, David Bahnsen turns the modern anti-work narrative on its head and makes a case for the joy of being a producer. I highly recommend it, especially for hard-working dads.
— Pastor Michael Foster
Too often, books on faith and work lack credibility, either because the author lacks any meaningful experience in the marketplace or any heft in their theological analysis of it. Bahnsen succeeds where others fail, offering a vision of work as a way of bearing God’s image, participating in the making and new-making of creation, and fulfilling our God-given and created purpose. By far, the best treatment of the subject I’ve read.”
— Mike Cosper, Director of Media at Christianity Today
“Bahnsen can and does see all of the above through a religious prism simply because in his rendering, God is “a worker who made us in his image.” This is especially notable because Bahnsen has an answer to Keynes, and those since Keynes who worship at the odd altar of consumption. As Bahnsen sees it, “if we already know that God made us to produce, we don’t need to spend a century wondering how best to manipulate demand in pursuit of economic growth.” He goes on to write that “human beings do not need to be told to want things.” Absolutely! Bahnsen is a supply-sider, but so easily forgotten by supply-siders not Bahnsen are Bahnsen’s reminders that “the total production of goods and services drives the total demand in an economy,” and that “before any of us can be a source of demand, we must first be a source of supply.” Basically, God made us in his image to produce, which means demand that mirrors the latter is always and everywhere taken care of so long as we’re free to produce.”
— John Tamny, Forbes, May 30, 2024
“Enter the workforce with excitement and zeal, not as if it’s a chore or something to begrudge, but rather to create purpose”
— Erika Kurtz, New York Post, May 5, 2024
“Bahnsen’s Full-Time points out that American culture generally (including church culture) undervalues work. Many see work as a means to the end of not working. Many miss the way God created both physical and intellectual work before that tragic day in Eden: Adam was a gardener and a namer. After the fall, work is harder but still a means to discover our meaning and purpose, and to glorify God by cultivating the world he created.”
— Marvin Olasky, Desiring God, April 30, 2024
“Bahnsen condemns the Hollywood trope of an overly ambitious parent who neglects his family – it is almost always the father – as he tries to win the next promotion or grow his business or keep his job in the grimy corporate world. Bahnsen does not dispute there are neglectful parents, but he rightly says that this all-too common view – it seeps into sermons in Christian churches – wrongly pits work versus family life when in fact the problem, where it exists at all, is wrongly prioritizing one’s life. Bahnsen says that mankind is made for work as God, the Creator, made us in his image (Imago Dei), so we, too, are supposed to create.”
— Paul Tuns, The Interim, April 10, 2024
David’s Q&A with Dana Perino of Fox News
— Dana Perino, Fox News, April 4, 2024
“Bahnsen proposes a solution to our woes that is so old school it’s biblical. Instead of a lifelong dream of a multi-decade retirement or a short-term hope for work-life balance, we should speak in the language of the Sabbath, and talk about a life of work and rest.
If this model of six days of working and one restig is so helpful, why do we hear so little about it? Bahnsen’s answer: “I believe one of the key reasons so many pastors fail to preach a Biblical and properly ordered view of work is that many pastors, themselves, suffer from a horrifically inadequate work ethic.
— James Bruce, Law & Liberty Book Review, April 3, 2024
“Immediately after finishing this book I was on the phone recommending it to others. Perhaps it’s just my love of surprising and even edgy cultural commentary, but I don’t think so. I thought of my own sons and their struggle with our culture’s constant criticism of hard work. At 18 and 19, they both came to the hard-won conclusion that it wasn’t until they adopted that demanding workout routine or showed up to that early-morning construction job that they really started to feel a sense of order and purpose in their days. This book also worked out in detail what I’ve long suspected: that our weak theology of creation is doing terrible cultural damage. I’ve often said that we need an imago Dei revolution. When it comes, Full-Time will remind us not to leave out that element of our lives that shapes so much of our engagement with the neighbors we’ve been commanded to love: our work.”
— Rachel Ferguson, Acton Institute, April 1, 2024
“What Sanders misses, as the economist David Bahnsen argues in a new book, “Full Time: Work and the Meaning of Life,” is that work is good for us — indeed, an inherent part of the human condition. Moreover, the problem isn’t that Americans work too much, but that too many Americans aren’t working at all.
Noting the long-term decline in labor-force participation, Bahnsen points out that if the participation rate were the same as it was in 2000, an additional 10 million Americans would be working, with a concomitant increase in goods and services.“
— Rich Lowry, NEW YORK POST, March 22, 2024
“The Christian religion and all that it entails is simply what David believes and, further, he believes that Christianity provides the very metaphysical, moral, and intellectual foundations for his premise: that we were made to work. In sum: Full Time is a full-throated promotion of work and labor from a distinctly Christian point of view.”
— Brian Mattson, The Square Inch, February 28, 2024
“David Bahnsen is one of the most interesting thinkers on faith and work in the United States,” said NGU Provost Dr. Hunter Baker. “I am amazed at his level of energy and his ability to remain fully plugged into markets and fully intellectually engaged as a Christian at the same time. His visit was tremendously stimulating for NGU.”
— NGU News, February 27, 2024
“I do highly recommend this book. It would be an excellent source for a Bible Study, especially for men. Our view of work is very important since we do so much of it. The book contains much wisdom which David himself has gained over the years as he went from working in a movie theatre at 15 years of age to a multi-billion-dollar financial advisor. Being raised in the home of a preacher and scholar who was shunned by so many of his own colleagues teaches a son a great deal too. You need to buy the book and work at reading it.
— Larry Ball, The Aquila Report, February 27, 2024
“David Bahnsen’s new work on work … is to my knowledge the first distinctively Christian treatment of work in the history of the church rooted in the theology of the creational order. In giving the weightiest consideration to creation, Bahnsen lays out his most controversial theme in a book featuring enough controversies to raise eyebrows all over Christianity: man’s chief calling in God’s creative order is to work. Bahnsen would not dissent from the well-known catechetical statement that “man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” But man’s chief end is not the same as man’s chief calling. And man’s chief calling as a relates to his responsibility in the earth is to work.“
— Andrew Sandlin, CultureChange, February 23, 2024
So much of Bahnsen’s book agrees with the thesis of the groundbreaking book Superabundance by Gale L. Pooley of the Discovery Institute and Marian L. Tupy of the Cato Institute. These authors resist the mainstream notion that population growth necessarily entails a diminishment of resources, and that the solution for the continuation of the human race is to curb the fertility rate (which is already falling in the U.S). Instead, they show that human innovation and creativity is what drives economic growth, and that the more humans on earth we have, the more sophisticated, smart, and effective our solutions will be for generating wealth and creating a web of goods and services. Applying mind to matter is what leads to economic prosperity. That’s why we need free and virtuous societies that honor the entrepreneurial spirit. This is also what Bahnsen argues. Human-generated production fuels the economy. In order to have something to consume, we must first produce.
— Peter Biles, Mind Matters, February 19, 2024
Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life by David Bahnsen. The author of this book is a force of nature. He runs a wildly successful investment firm, contributes regularly for WORLD Magazine and other publications, is a regular on the business channel CNBC, and writes books that are far better than a man this busy should be writing. Full-Time makes a spirited, biblical case for work as a gift from God. It dismantles the “sacred-secular” divide by making the simple yet profound point that – as Abraham Kuyper said – “every square inch” of life belongs to God. It’s learned without being pedantic, thoroughly biblical, and clearly written. Highly recommended.
— Warren Cole Smith, Ministry Watch, February 16, 2024
“Bahnsen’s primary professional calling is wealth management; he is also the host of National Review’s Capital Record podcast and a frequent commentator on economics and politics. In his forthcoming book, he mounts an impassioned defense of “an elevated view of work” against its critics in the culture at large and particularly within American Evangelical Christianity. His case is a sociological, economic, and theological one. Citing scripture and Christian thinkers from Dorothy Sayers to John Paul II, he decries a “latent dualism that pits the Kingdom of God against our productive endeavors on earth.” (The notion of “work–life balance,” the work-from-home trend, and pastors with a poor work ethic are among his other targets.) Our labor is not valuable simply as a means to charitable giving or more exalted pursuits, Bahnsen argues, but is an integral part of our identity and a foundation for human flourishing. Work, in other words, is not a necessary evil to be borne until retirement sets us free but a positive good, for individuals and society.”
— Katherine Howell, National Review Magazine, February 2024 Issue
