God and the Economy

	PDF study guide PDF "Fair Exchange" Albino Barrera PDF "Doktè Paul" Debra Bendis PDF "Hidden pursuits" Lillian Daniel PDF "Enron, etc." Whitworth Ferguson III PDF "Price to pay" Amy Laura Hall PDF "Unjustly taxed" An interview with Susan Pace Hamill PDF "Taming the beast" Douglas A. Hicks PDF "Capital Gains" Deirdre McCloskey PDF "Overcompensation" William J. McDonough PDF "Burdens of choice" R. Stephen Warner PDF "Making do" David Williamson

Think of the following exchanges: You go to the store to buy something. You’re in a hurry, but the cashier, underpaid and unappreciated, is disinclined either to help you hurry or to convince you that you want to shop there again. No matter—you have your eggs and you head for home, forgetting the whole thing

Or this: The newspaper runs yet another article lamenting the trade deficit in the United States. Yet it mentions that economists are not worried. Isn’t it appropriate that other countries make simple things like erasers, and the U.S. makes more sophisticated things like fighter jets and missiles? Perhaps Americans’ consumption of others’ goods suggests that ours is still the best economy going, and that others are just straining to catch up.

Or this: Someone you do not know well, a pleasant acquaintance rather than a genuine friend, overwhelms you with a precious gift. Uh oh. You haven’t given her a gift before. Should you now? But that would suggest you’re better friends than you are, which apparently she already assumes.

Or this: You’ve baby-sat for their kid three times in a row. They owe you. But again they’re calling you to baby-sit. Sure, you don’t keep score on these things, but you want a bit of reciprocity, or at least consideration.

Or this: The offering plates are distributed, and the people put their money in, some begrudgingly, some happily; some giving a little, some a lot, most in between. The ushers bring the offering forward at the doxology, and also bring the bread and wine for the Eucharist. The minister stands to thank God for these gifts from our hands, which God will bless, sanctify and redistribute for the hallowing of God’s people and the church’s work in the world.

Now the question is this, are these economic exchanges? By most definitions of economics, only the first two would count, and then barely. For the considerations about the shopper’s harriedness and the cashier’s crabbiness or the implication of injustice in mentioning that high-tech weaponry is perhaps the most important U.S. export would not matter to most economists. What matters are the forces of supply and demand that determine price and so determine whether consumers will buy more of this product than another, at this store or another, and so whether a business will be profitable.

The others would seem not to be economic exchanges, though we all experience these sorts of delicate interactions among friends and acquaintances and at liturgies. Yet for some cultures precisely these sorts of exchanges are economic. They involve an exchange of goods, if not always monetary certainly of a certain value, with the expectation that both parties will give for the sake of the upbuilding of a community. The ecclesial example illustrates the church at its most explicitly economic: we pass these plates before everyone and demand their money, which is then redistributed to bless God’s world (or so we hope!). A Jewish friend of mine complains about this practice. She says, “You Christians accuse us Jews of being worldly. Well that’s the most worldly thing imaginable! Handling money in worship, everyone can see what you put in or if you don’t. We Jews are really more spiritual than that.” Her wisdom is right—Christians’ standard canards against Jews not only don’t work, they mask a deeply Jewish earthiness of our own economic practices.

The church’s wealth is explicitly economic as the term is normally understood. Congregations are tax-exempt organizations, meaning they agree to be apolitical in return for this favorable status from the IRS. Further, anyone around a church very long will know that some of our most contentious fights are over our budgets. Do we keep sending money to the national office if they pass policies with which we disagree? Do we give the preacher a raise? How do we meet this budget if so few of us tithe? These are fundamentally economic arguments. And they are also deeply theological. For they deal with how the “house,” the oikos in Greek, conducts itself. This is why the words ecumenism and economics begin similarly—they both have to do with the ordering of a “household,” metaphorically speaking, in one case of the church, in the other of financial exchanges.

How do these two oikoi, these two houses, relate? Not well, for most moderns. Indeed, although the Christian Century ran a large number of articles about economics in 2004 due to the continuing fallout of the financial crises of the previous years, new scandals over CEO pay and so on, it is always difficult to relate our theology to these larger economic issues. This is because our imaginations have been shaped to think of economics as something large, global even, and the church as something parochial and religious and therefore private. Our writers, skilled in the sciences of both economics and God, try to relate these two. While the bridges they build between the two may be compelling for religious readers, they will likely seem to nonreligious readers to be either theocratic, since they seek to “impose” religious beliefs on others, or, in a judgment that is even more condemning, simply quaint.

Yet Christians must say something about the economic goings-on in the world around us. As Jim Wallis of Sojourners has been insisting for years, a Bible without references to the poor, with those scissored out, would be a holey Bible indeed, with the law, the prophets, the Gospels and the epistles all in shreds. Regarding the hot-button issues of the day, especially abortion and homosexuality, one could read for thousands of pages and not find a single reference. Not so with poverty. God cares fundamentally about the poor, to the extent that a great deal of what Christians regard as God’s word is taken up with matters of how to spend money.

A specifically Christian view of economics should begin with the beginning. The Garden of Eden is a lush place, full of good food, good drink, and time to enjoy good companionship. Another good place to begin would be at the end: God’s kingdom, often envisioned in scripture as a banquet with plenty of food for all, with places at the table for anyone who will humbly come and infinite time for companionship with the banquet’s Host. Separating these two instances of feasting is, of course, the fall, after which our use of money is intertwined with the Bible’s narrative of the struggle between sin and redemption. That long in-between time has been described in some great aphorisms from contemporary preachers: Billy Graham says, “You tell me what you think about money and I’ll tell you what you think about God.” Jim Forbes insists, “No one gets into heaven without a letter of recommendation from the poor.” And a contemporary writer with the soul of a preacher, Anne Lamott, says that if you neglect the poor, not even Jesus can help you.

The Pentateuch includes frequent admonitions for Israel to take care of the poor, the widow, the sojourner in its midst. This is not just a matter of being nice, it is a reflection of Israel’s memory that it was weak in Egypt, and so a sign of God’s salvation wrought in the exodus. The “land of milk and honey” that so formed Israel’s imagination is an unmistakable echo of the bounty of Eden, however imperfect its realization. The Levitical laws ingrain care for the poor into the most basic acts of Israel’s economic life: “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God” (Lev. 19:9-10). Deuteronomy’s provisions for Israel’s economic life include prohibitions against usury—that is, the lending of money at interest. They include measures to prevent the accumulation of multigenerational debt, including periodic cancellation of debts and the remittance of ancestral lands every 50 years in the famous Jubilee. Even the land was supposed to lie fallow every seventh year. What we know as good agricultural practice the Jews knew as a reflection of a God who took time to rest from the work of creation, whose people try in their life to image God’s nature in the world.

The biblical prophets lament the loss of faithfulness to the Bible’s provisions, especially its economic ones. Isaiah depicts a terrifying destiny for those who neglect the poor: “You who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil and that you may make the orphans your prey! What will you do on the day of punishment, in the calamity that will come from far away? To whom will you flee for help, and where will you leave your wealth, so as not to crouch among the prisoners or fall among the slain?” (Isa. 10:1-4). Amos screeches at those who “grind the heads of the poor” as they sleep on “beds of ivory” (Amos 6:4-7). Ezekiel sears with white-hot anger at economic injustice in Israel. From a different vantage point, the psalmist often laments the prosperity of the wicked, and Proverbs advises that the riches of the wealthy are fleeting. Wealth is never far from the surface in Israel’s scripture. Perhaps a church in a complacent age of gluttonous wealth among the few and wrenching poverty among the many can do nothing more important than to preach more frequently from the Old Testament.

Many of Jesus’ best-remembered sayings have to do with money. His word about the widow’s mite is a favorite (Mark 12:43-44). His programmatic announcement of his ministry in Luke 4 proclaims Isaiah’s words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18). Many of the villains in his stories care more about money than other people or God, and many of the heroes respond to his preaching with a financial sign of their repentance.

“Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (Mark 12:17) is so often quoted it is easy to forget its source. Yet it may be one of the less helpful sayings here. Precisely what is Caesar’s and what is God’s? A member of the Christian Coalition cited the verse in support of President Bush’s massive tax cut for the wealthy in 2004. Apparently Jesus’ own lack of a job, the emptiness of his pockets just before he uttered the aphorism, and the Gospels’ naming of wealthy woman patrons who paid for the boys to wander the desert talking were skipped in the spokesman’s Sunday school (Luke 8:3).

The Gospels treat economics and salvation as integrally interrelated. When Mary sings in celebration of the annunciation, it is a thoroughly political song she sings, one that would sound communist to the ears of anyone raised during the Cold War if they were unaware of the source: “He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:52-53). Mary’s words are even more difficult to spiritualize—that is, to apply to our private souls instead of our pocketbooks and society—than Jesus’ oft-quoted “the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” Both are economic all the way down.

The glimpses of the early church that we gain from Acts and the epistles suggest the primacy of money in the salvation heralded by Pentecost. In Acts we read that believers repeatedly gave away their possessions and lived in common as a crucial sign of their faith. St. Paul spends a great deal of time in his letters appealing to believers to help him take a collection to Jerusalem. In the past some scholars opined that this was because the Jerusalem church had given all its wealth away and so now was destitute. More recent scholars have suggested that Paul may have thought the delivery of this collection from the Gentile churches to the Jewish church at Jerusalem would be integral to the coming of the eschaton. In any event, economics loom large enough for Paul to describe the incarnation itself in economic terms: “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9).

Among the latter books of the New Testament, Hebrews is often criticized for beginning a platonizing streak in Christian thought that led the church away from the Hebraic grittiness still present in other portions of the New Testament. Yet notice a key Deuteronomic theme: care of the needy. “Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it” (Heb. 13:2). Liberation theologians, who have in recent decades drawn heavily on many of these biblical themes in their work, have drawn on a portion of Hebrews: “The high priest carries the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp. And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood” (13:11-12). Jesus is in solidarity with those who are slaughtered and disposed of outside the city gate.

A verse that struck terror in my heart when I heard fire-and-brimstone-style sermons as a child was: “Because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:16). This was wielded as a threat against young kids at camp, who’d better accept Jesus or else. But notice what John the Seer precisely directs his ire against: “You say ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked” (Rev. 3:17). Even in the moments we take to be most other-worldly in the Bible, the basic reality of our pocketbooks is implicated.

This race through the Bible does paltry justice to the breadth and depth of its teaching about economics (see the bibliography for additional sources).  But for beginning a course on the Century’s recent work on theology and economics it may suffice. To extend the historical preface into church history would yield a great deal more: The desert fathers reading in the Bible to give their possessions away, and then giving away the very Bible in which they read this. St. Anthony hearing of Jesus’ insistence that the rich man sell his possessions and follow, and actually going and doing it. St. Lawrence being ordered to produce the church’s treasure for the Roman persecutors, and going and gathering the poor people in the church and presenting them as the church’s greatest treasure. For this nifty sermon illustration Lawrence was grilled alive. St. Francis imitating St. Anthony and building a movement of imitators in the Middle Ages. Dorothy Day in this century standing up to the unjust economic system of capitalism and pushing a specifically Christian socialism in her journalism, writing and organizing of Catholic Worker houses. Millard Fuller not only giving his own wealth away but starting an initiative, Habitat for Humanity, that could be a place for other wealthy people to honorably divest themselves of their wealth for the purpose of building houses for the needy. The church, biblically and historically speaking, has been at its best when it has been with God’s poor, and indeed when it has been poor itself.

This guide is meant to shepherd you and your fellow church members through the rich and fascinating news and opinion articles on economics from 2004. Hopefully it will stimulate further questions about God, money and the costliness of discipleship. A South American liberation theologian and priest has said, “when I gave help to the poor, they called me a Christian. When I asked why there were poor, they called me a communist.” Jesus did both, and whatever we call it, we must also call it being the church.

A friend of mine, David Cloutier, is a theologian who teaches at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University in Minnesota. He first alerted me to the economic significance of a common ecclesial exchange. Have you ever seen a priest or minister presiding over the Eucharist look up and notice there’s not enough bread? What does he or she do? Simply breaks off smaller pieces. There is enough of Jesus in the smallest piece of eucharistic bread, so no matter how many of us there are, there will always be enough Eucharist. Just break off smaller pieces. This quotidian practice hints at the theology of abundance of the Eden texts, which Christians anticipate as an eschatological feast in our Eucharist. If there’s always room for more at the altar, if there’s always room for one more at our table when we’re being hospitable, then how should our economic life be structured? The following articles should help us find out.