At Fieldnotes Magazine, Matthew Kaemingk has an excellent article on why Christians should care about intermediary institutions:
When presented with almost any social problem (education, health care, poverty, family life, and so on), today’s leaders typically point to one of two possible solutions—a freer market or a stronger state. But in opposition to these rather myopic solutions, I think there is a more complex and biblical lens through which leaders can consider the social eco-system and the people who move around in it.
Instead of simplistic descriptions of human beings as either clients of the state or competitors in the market, the Christian Scriptures present humanity in a refreshingly complex way. We find a complex creature with a wide variety of gifts, abilities, interests, aspects, loyalties, and solidarities. Created in the image of God, human beings in the Bible are anything but simple. They are musical, communal, religious, artistic, familial, charitable, scientific, literary, moral, athletic, fun, and funny. The robust anthropology found in the Bible depicts a creature that could never be fully defined, controlled, content, or nourished by the market or the state alone—thank God.
If history has taught us anything, it is that creative and complex homo sapiens will consistently refuse to be limited to economic or political categories. Even under extreme political and economic oppression, human beings consistently long for things like beauty, charity, comfort, sport, friendship, rhyme, worship, and play. These aspects of the Imago Dei seem to demand an ever-wider range of human groupings, beyond the state and market.
