Economics at the Jesus Creed: Michael Kruse 10

Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman cultures had no concept of economics as we have known it over the past century or so ... the systematic analysis of production, distribution, and human decision making. We tend to think of society as government, business, family, religion, and education, ... each with distinct traditions and semi-autonomous institutions. Everything in the ancient world was subsumed under kinship and politics. What happened "economically" was an extension of these two ancient institutions.

Ancient Near East patriarchy and Greco-Roman patronage was the milieu of biblical times. Appreciating this is critical. God always revealed himself into specific contexts. For instance, it is a cardinal doctrine of Christianity that there is one God. It was believed that there were many gods in the ancient Near East. Note the first of the Ten Commandments: "Do not have any other gods before me." Passages like this do not correct the mistaken notion of multiple gods but rather limit worship to Yahweh. The "one God" concept comes into focus later. Concerning enemies, the Hebrew law reforms the sevenfold vengeance into the equitable "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." Then Jesus says, "love your enemies." Slavery, in one form or another, seems unquestioned in the Old and New Testament. Yet today we consider it unethical. Treating culturally bound practices and revelations as transcendent mandates creates a number of problems. Context is important.

Jesus' context was First Century Palestine. The "American dream" for the Jewish Palestinian was to own his land, to live in self-sufficiency, and to barter within the village to supplement what was not produced at home. There was no concept of specialization of labor or an expanding economy. Economic life was a zero-sum game where anyone who became significantly wealthier than others did so at the expense of others. Furthermore, the powerful persistently tried to impose monetary exchange on to the community to facilitate the collection of taxes and fees. Lending was a way of trapping people in debt and confiscating their land. Where we see money as a liberating force, the peasants of Jesus' day viewed money as a means of oppression. This is the context into which Jesus delivered his message of the coming Kingdom.

Consequently, we see criticism of hoarding in Jesus' message. The powerful stored up grain they had extracted from peasants. Crops frequently sat in storage facilities serving no productive use until the owners saw fit to sell them. Some uncritically apply "hoarding" to anyone who has wealth today. Yet most wealth held by the wealthy today is in the form of productive assets. Wealth is invested through ownership of personal businesses or through shareholdings in firms that produce goods and services. Wealth is placed on deposit to be lent to other people for business enterprise and discretionary projects. All of this creates more wealth, more goods and services, and more jobs. Clearly those who invest more wisely are going to be wealthier than others who do not. Are these people hoarding?

Similarly, while greed was essentially craving more than your fair share of a fixed amount in Jesus' context, is someone having more than others do through prudent investing and management in an ever growing economy evidence of greed? If not, than what constitutes greed? Is lending money in order to help finance productive enterprises different from lending money to those in need? How does one determine how much to consume, how much to invest, and how much to give? What constitutes a just economic system? How does one discern the common good, much less pursue it? These are not academic questions to the great majority of business people I converse with.

My experience is that Christian leaders of many different stripes do not handle these questions well. They uncritically lift Scripture passages out of context ... or maybe read their present context back on to Scripture ... to support particular views. There is the prosperity "name and claim it" gospel that cherry picks from passages about faith and blessing. Another view finds free market exchange emanating from the Word ... success in business comes close to being equated with spiritual maturity and receiving God's blessing. Then there is Liberation theology with its roots in sociology and conflict theory (Marxian analysis.) In Mainline Protestantism, Scripture's "economic" teachings are little more than soft-socialism baptized in theological language. Roman Catholic social teaching is one place where I think there has been some solid reflection on economic issues, although even here I question the way some economic issues are framed. But I suggest that there is something deeper than just poor interpretative frameworks.

Most theologians and church leaders I've encountered have considerable ambivalence, at best, and outright animus, at worst, toward the marketplace. Charles North and Bob Smietana write in Good Intentions:

"In interviewing businesspeople for her book Church on Sunday, Work on Monday, [Laura] Nash discovered a chasm between how business people and their pastors saw economics. Pastors and church leaders talked in restrictive terms about the need to limit greed. The businesspeople in their congregations had a different view.

'Business people took a positive, additive view: faith was about expanding economic opportunity for more people through business success,' says Nash. 'For the business person, business was about solving problems and creating prosperity and it centered on specific activities.'" (37-38)

John C. Knapp, a professor at Samford University and Columbia Theological Seminary, wrote an article three years ago about the perceptions of the church by businesspeople. He mentions one study (which I heard him review in person) that featured interviews with 200 Christians from all walks of life, ranging from a Fortune 500 CEO to retail clerks. Each was invited to identify a time when they had encountered a particular ethical problem in the course of their work. When asked if they had sought counsel from a pastor or spiritual leader all but two or three said no. The most frequently given reason for not doing so is that their pastor would not understand or would not care. Another survey of 2,000 people who regularly attend church were asked, "Have you ever in your life heard a sermon, read a book, listened to a tape, or been to a seminar that applied biblical principles to everyday work issues?" Ninety percent said, "No."

Miroslav Volf writes in Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work:

"Given the paramount importance of work in both liberal and socialist economic and social theory, it is remarkable that in our world dominated by work a serious crisis in work had to strike before church bodies paid much attention to the problem of human work. Theologians are to blame for the former negligence. Amazingly little theological reflection has taken place in the past about an activity that takes up so much of our time. The number of pages theologians have devoted to the question of transubstantiation - which does or does not take place on Sunday - for instance, would, I suspect, far exceed the number of pages devoted to work that fills our lives Monday through Saturday. My point is not to belittle the Christ in the Lord's Supper but to stress that a proper perspective on human work is at least as important." (69)

While more attempts to rectify this deficiency are emerging, the reflection is still most often done in isolation from mainstream economics. In fact, I frequently detect a prideful admission of economic ignorance in some literature, signaling that the Christian scholar has not been corrupted by such degenerate thinking. Economics is to Mainline Protestant seminaries what evolution is to many conservative seminaries. Mario Varagas Llosa says human nature demands two things for our world: A hero to solve our problems and a villain to blame for creating them. Business people are quite clear what role they've been assigned by all but some conservative Evangelicals and Pentecostals.

Business people need ... and in my experience many of them crave ... to know how their day to day work connects with the mission of God in the world. They struggle for clarity in the work they do. When this connection becomes real for them, ethical decisions become clearer. The obligation to use resources to bring the poor into the economy with dignity, and to exercise proper respect for the environment, emerges. Yet, the Church, by and large, seems content to A) uncritically lionize business success, B) to ignore economics and the world of business, or C) to treat brothers and sisters called to marketplace work with condescending platitudes about abundance and avoidance of greed. The venues where genuine economists and theologians meet are few. Scot has provided a venue here at Jesus Creed for such discussions to develop. I hope many others will follow his lead.

A few of questions. I hammered theologians and Christian leaders pretty hard at the end of this post. Is it justified? Do you agree that we need more venues for this dialog to happen? In what venues do you see dialog that draws on both mainstream economics and scholarly theological insight?