Archive for August, 2011

God’s Economics, Part I: Meet the Landlord

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

(This is part 1 of a series I’m cross-posting from my church’s blog.)

In this series, I’m going to discuss some of what I see as the central economic principles found in Scripture, and what they mean for us not only as individuals but also as a Church and as a society. If we accept, as any Christian should, that God has something to say to us about the way we deal with wealth and resources, what is God saying? What is God calling us to do? This series will address four principles of what I’m calling “God’s Economics,” and then expand a bit to discuss what those principles should tell us about our personal economic behavior, our Church’s prophetic role in talking about wealth and resources, and our roles as voters and citizens in a democratic republic that is also the richest nation in the history of the human race.

Principle #1: Everything belongs to God.

The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it,
the world, and all who live in it;
for he founded it on the seas
and established it on the waters.

—Psalm 24:1

This is by far the most significant orienting principle of God’s economics: We don’t own anything. Our houses, our clothes, our cars, our furniture, our fancy computers, our bikes, the money in our bank accounts—none of this is really ours. It all belongs to God, and we are simply stewards. This may seem rather non-controversial—I mean, what Christian wouldn’t acknowledge that everything belongs to God?—but when it comes right down to it, in our heart of hearts, we’re very resistant to this doctrine.

 
For my undergraduate education, I went to Calvin College, a college run by the Christian Reformed Church, a Calvinist denomination (duh) of mostly Dutch descent. While I have many, many issues with Reformed theology—issues I won’t belabor here—the main specific doctrinal statement of the CRC is titled “Our World Belongs to God.” What would it look like if we took that seriously, if we really thought of each and every atom in this universe as belonging to God, with only the tiniest little fragile corner entrusted to us?

How do we live with this? The guidelines, I think, are indicated by Jesus when He echoes the book of Deuteronomy:

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

—Matthew 22:34-40

The priority list is clear: First, God’s glory; then, the benefit of your neighbor. (When you think about it, the two aren’t incompatible in any way.) So what do these mean?

Well, for starters, we wouldn’t use up or throw away something that belongs to someone else, would we? Particularly not if they’re someone we love, and they entrusted it to us for safekeeping or for improvement. If your grandmother gave you a priceless antique watch that she’d had for years, asking you to keep it safe for her, you wouldn’t start etching it. You wouldn’t melt it down for the gold in it. And you sure wouldn’t throw it on the ground and break it.

That plastic bottle you throw in the trash? That’s God’s plastic. The Chesapeake Bay, being poisoned by runoff from fertilizers used on farms and lawns? That’s God’s bay. The mountaintops of West Virginia, being blown up by companies who want to get at the coal inside them? Those are God’s mountaintops they’re blowing up, and the air that the coal poisons when we burn it is God’s air.

God is not glorified by wastefulness. God is not glorified when something useful is turned into something useless. God is not glorified by landfills. God is not glorified when we break the Creation God has given us.

That’s priority one; what about priority two? What does it mean when we start from the principle that everything belongs to God, and use those of God’s things that have been entrusted to us to love our neighbors as ourselves?

For the ease of a linguistic shorthand, of course, we still talk about property belonging to a person rather than simply being entrusted to them by God—and people throughout the Bible, including Jesus, do this as well, even as we know that they wouldn’t disagree with the Psalmist’s assertion that “the earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it.”

But this tenet of God’s economics, to love your neighbor as yourself, means that there is nothing that is “mine” or “yours”—there are only things that are ours. If I love someone else as much as I do myself, I will have absolutely no qualms with the idea of sharing the things that we’ve both been entrusted with.

Even a few seconds’ thought about this reveals that it’s a very challenging doctrine in practice. My house isn’t mine; it’s ours, for the benefit of everyone. The money in my bank account isn’t mine; it’s ours, for the benefit of everyone. My car isn’t mine; it’s ours, for the benefit of everyone. So is the food in my fridge, the shirt on my back, the phone in my pocket. If I love my neighbor as myself, I’ll make all of “my” things available to my neighbor too. 

In fact, Jesus explicitly makes that link:

“Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

—Luke 6:30-31

“Give to everyone who asks you.” That’s relatively easy and painless when it’s a homeless guy on the street asking for some change—but what happens if he asks to sleep on your couch for the night, or asks you for your coat on a cold day? Even more cuttingly—would you even wait for him to ask to crash on your couch or borrow your coat if he were a close friend of yours who was facing the prospect of sleeping in the street on a winter night?

But my first thought—and, I suspect, yours as well—is something along the lines of “But I know my friends; I don’t know the guy on the street! Who’s to say that if he crashes on my couch tonight, I won’t wake up tomorrow to find my TV and stereo gone with him?”

“…and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.” It wasn’t mine anyway, so why do I care? Maybe selling my TV will get him enough money to eat for the next week.

I’m not saying that you should invite the next person you see on the street to come sleep on your couch tonight—though if that’s what God is calling you to do, by all means do it. It is a deeply challenging idea, radical and unsettling to the point of being all but unlivable.

I know I’m certainly not strong enough or faithful enough or trusting enough to live in anything even resembling this manner. I like having the possessions I have, and the idea of having a stranger sleeping in my house would give me the willies—not just because I’d be concerned about my possessions, but also because I’d be concerned about my safety.

But this is the logical endpoint of the idea that everything belongs to God—and it can be an aspirational principle even if it isn’t a guide for living. What would it look like if we asked God to mold our hearts to live just a little more like this every day, both individually and as a church, neighborhood, or society? This is God’s ideal—that we treat nothing as if it is ours, that we not be attached to the clothes on our backs, the money in our bank accounts, the things in our homes.

Everything belongs to God—and the reason things are entrusted to us is not for our own happiness, but so that we might use it for God’s glory and the good of our neighbor. That is the foundational principle of God’s economics.

Next time: The key question about God’s character—and what it tells us about our personal and societal economies.

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FRC’s Disturbing Economic Rhetoric

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

I’ve had a browser tab open for a few days now with this press release from the “Faith Family Freedom Fund” (now there’s some Orwellian naming), intending to blog about it—because it’s an indication that the so-called “Christian” Right has allowed the right-wing ideologies of greed to trump even the most basic Christian teachings.

The press release announced a radio ad they were running in several states—including Ohio—in order to counter the Catholic Bishops who were telling John Boehner, a Roman Catholic, that Catholic teaching (to which he is bound) says that government has a direct responsibility to the poor.

Here’s the text that bothered me:

“There’s a group of well-meaning but misguided ministers who believe that the government is responsible for meeting the needs of the poor, calling proposed budget cuts immoral. But Jesus didn’t instruct the government of his day to take the rich young ruler’s property and redistribute it to the poor. He asked the ruler to sell his possessions and help the poor. Charity is an individual choice, not a government mandate.”

Now, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, I do honestly think that Christians of good conscience and good faith can disagree on whether or not it’s the government’s place to engage in wealth redistribution. I’m of the opinion that it has to be because the government sets up the economy, so it’s the duty of the Christian democratic citizen to work toward the aim of the economy benefitting as many people as possible rather than enriching the few at the expense of the many, but I can see where reasonable people can disagree on that.

No, the problem with this statement is that it presents “charity” as a “choice” for the Christian: something where if he or she chooses to do it, that’s another crown in heaven, but if he or she chooses not to do it that’s fine too.

This ideology is further reinforced in the ad’s discussion of Jesus’s conversation with the rich young ruler (found in Luke 18, among other places in the Synoptics). Please tell me how anyone could possibly interpret this as Jesus “asking” the rich young ruler to sell his possessions and give them to the poor:

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”Luke 18:22

Where in there do you see that as a request? That is a command, plain and simple: Selling all you have and giving it to the poor is a prerequisite for the rich young ruler to follow Jesus. It is a choice, but only in that the rich young ruler can choose to sell all he has, or he can choose not to follow Jesus. He cannot follow Jesus while still holding to his possessions.

The problem is in calling giving to the poor “charity” to begin with—and my guess as to why they use that word is because they want to avoid the word they should be using: Justice.

Because “charity” is a choice, an optional extra, and when you’ve done it, you get to pat yourself on the back for going above and beyond for other people. “Charity” is a giant cardboard check, a hospital wing named after you, an interview on Oprah’s couch.

“Justice,” on the other hand, isn’t optional; you’re either acting justly or unjustly, and if you aren’t doing justice then you’re complicit in injustice. And you don’t get accolades for doing justice; it’s what you’re supposed to be doing, it is what you owe. You don’t get special recognition for paying your debts or doing what you’re supposed to; the checks are their normal 2″x5″ size, the hospital wing is in the honor of an “anonymous” donor, and Oprah’s couch remains occupied by an actor talking about their latest movie.

Alms are not “charity,” for the Christian. They are “justice,” a mandate. They are demanded of each and every follower of God, and giving them is not an extra act of goodness but simply the fulfillment of God’s demand.

In other words—while we can disagree on whether the government should be in the business of wealth redistribution, there can be absolutely no disagreement on the part of Christians that the people of God should be in the business of wealth redistribution. God demands it of God’s people.

But calling it “justice” would upset the rich. Note the part this so-called “pastor,” this man who claims to be a man of God, is omitting from the passage about the rich young ruler:

When [the ruler] heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy. Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Those who heard this asked, “Who then can be saved?”

Jesus replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”

Luke 18:23-27

If you’re rich—hell, even if you’re middle-class in America—that passage is scary. It is “possible” for a rich person to enter the Kingdom because God is great—but if it happens, it’s a miracle, on a par with a camel passing through the eye of a needle.

It is something remarkable, something more difficult and more miraculous and much more unlikely than a person of lesser means entering the Kingdom.

What would happen if the Church took that seriously—and told every rich person in our midst that if they don’t sell everything and give it to the poor, they’re banking on a miracle to enter the Kingdom?

That it’ll be something marvelous and incredible—on a level that’s well beyond the marvel of a normal person’s salvation—if they are actually capable of entering the Kingdom?

What would happen if we told the wealthy in our pews that their riches made it astronomically unlikely that they could possibly have a right relationship with God?

Because that’s what Jesus says.

So why is this supposedly “Christian” group saying exactly the opposite?

Because telling the rich that it’s okay to be rich—and reinforcing the anti-Christ ideology that wealth is a sign of favor, that the accumulation of wealth is the highest good, that those who are wealthy don’t have any responsibility but are simply “asked” very nicely by Jesus to please give a little bit to the poor—is more important than talking about God’s hard demands of the wealthy.

They have allowed the right-wing ideology of the ownership class to trump the clear teaching of Christ. They have allowed the Republican mantra to win out over Christian teaching.

They should stop calling themselves Christian pastors—and start calling themselves Republican pastors.

Because that’s what they are.

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