A Biblical Approach to the Economic Crisis

NOTE: I found an excellent theological analysis of our current economic mess written by Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggeman, professor emeritus of Columbia Theological Seminary. I am pasting in the first part of the article below. You can access the entire article HERE.
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So far as I know, the Bible says nothing explicit about subprime loans and the financial implications of such risky economic practice. There is a great deal, nonetheless, that the Bible has to say about such a crisis as we now face. I will comment in turn on a biblical perspective of an analysis of the crisis and a biblical perspective for an alternative economic practice.

While the specifics of the current market collapse are peculiarly modern, biblical perspectives are pertinent because the fundamental issues of economics are constant from ancient to contemporary time, constants such as credit and debt, loans and interest, and the endless tension between haves and have-nots.
We may identify three dimensions of the theological-moral foundations of the current economic crisis:

AUTONOMY. A sense of the isolated, self-sufficient economic individual is deeply rooted in modern rationality and comes to full expression in U.S. “individualism” that resists communitarian connectedness and imagines the individual person to be the primary unit of social reality. Such an individual is completely autonomous, owes no one anything, is accountable to no one, and can rely on no one except himself or herself.

Such a self (perceived almost exclusively as an economic self) is without restraint and is self-authorized to enact Promethean energy to organize life around one’s own needs, issues, and purposes. The autonomous, self-sufficient self takes as the proper venue for life “the market” and understands the market as a place of self-advancement at the expense of all others who are perceived either as rivals and competitors or as usable commodities.

This same autonomy is articulated in the Bible under the rubric of “the fool” who says in his heart, “There is no God” (Psalm 14:1). The capacity to live without the gift or summons of God has immediate practical implications, for autonomy sets the fool over against the neighbor, most especially the poor neighbor. The one who says in Psalm 10:4 “There is no God” is the one who seeks out neighbors for exploitation: “They lurk that they may seize the poor; they seize the poor and drag them off in their net. They stoop, they crouch, and the helpless fall by their might. They think in their heart, ‘God has forgotten, He has hidden his face, he will never see it’” (Psalm 10:9-11).

.... continued at www.wondercafe.ca

Where is George Bailey when you need him?

We celebrate this Christmas in perhaps the worst national (and global) crisis since the oil shortage of the Carter years, and some say we will face the worst economic crisis since 1929 … a sort of “Great Recession.”

This made me think of one of my all-time favorite movies, “It’s a Wonderful Life” with Jimmy Stewart as the civic minded George Bailey and Lionel Barrymore in the role of the evil and greedy capitalist, Henry Potter.

For those of you who have not seen the movie (perish the thought); Mr. Potter is a banker who is attempting to take over Bedford Falls by buying out other businesses. The one business that stands in his way is a small, family owned savings and loan owned by George Bailey’s father. After the father’s death, George Bailey takes over his father’s savings and gives up his dream of a trip to Europe in order to keep the savings and loan afloat during a run on the bank. He ends up staying in Bedford Falls and spending the next 25 years on a small salary, raising his children and helping his neighbors and working friends get sufficient credit to own their own homes. At a critical moment, Mr. Potter steals the money from Baileys bank deposit, on Christmas Eve, just as a bank auditor arrives to look at the savings and loan books. Bailey despairs and considers suicide and expresses the wish that he had never been born. An angel named Clarence is sent to him to show him what life (and Bedford Falls) would have been like if George Bailey had never existed. At the end of the movie, George gets his life back, and all of the friends that he has made through a lifetime of service and friendship show up with contributions to make up the deficit. He is called the wealthiest man in Bedford Falls because of the integrity of his good name and the trust and loyalty of his friends. George Bailey is a good guy. He puts the collective good of his town, his business, his employees and his neighbors ahead of his own self interest.

For the sake of clarity, lets do a quick review of the recent bad news. First, investment giant Bear Stearns went under. There was a bank run in California in July and by Sept. 7, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were put on conservatorship to keep them from collapsing. News began to come out about their executives bailing out with golden parachutes consisting of hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses.

Then Lehman Brothers went out of business on Sept 13 after failing to convince the Federal Reserve to provide assistance. Then, on Sept. 16, AIG successfully demanded a bail-out from the Federal Reserve to the tune of 85 billion. AIG executives promptly yelled "YIPIIIIEEE! went on a lavish company retreat to celebrate and spent God-knows how much money on drinks and massages. Bank of America purchased Merrill Lynch on the cheap. On Sept 17 Bernanke and Paulson convinced President Bush that urgent action was needed to prevent an economic meltdown worse than 1929. Bush went before Congress on Sept. 20th to ask for a 700 billion bail-out package

While unemployment rose to its highest point in over 20 years, the executives whose greed and mismanagement contributed to this mess continued to get million dollar salaries and million dollar bonuses. The ratio of executive pay to the salaries of average employees grew from about 60 to 1 in the 1950s to over 500 to 1. click here (for the rise in salaries of CEOs of Defense contractors since 9/11, click here)The rich have been getting richer and the poor poorer. The middle class who buys all of the damn consumer crap is shrinking.

But wait… it gets better! Shades of Mr. Potter.

Just when we think that maybe the crisis is subsiding, we find out that the big three American automakers in Detroit are running out of money and may go bankrupt. If this happens, hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost, and multiple business will fail. “We cannot allow this to happen!” say the CEO’s of Ford, GM and Chrysler. So, crusading to save the American way, these courageous capitalists mount up on their private jets and fly to Washington (in three private jets) to the turn of $20,000 round trip EACH, compared to $180 for a seat on a commercial airline. Now, this is just staring to look ridiculous. Ford CEO Mulally’s employment contract was 28 million last year …let me repeat that … 28 MILLION! And they (CEOs AND Congress) are calling for labor to take the hit and reduce their salaries… give me a freakin break….

And if this is not enough … now we have the news about Governor Blagojevich attempting to SELL a U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder, and another 50 billion investment dollars are lost to a giant ponzi scheme that ran over a 20 year period and was overlooked by federal regulators. Go check out former chairman of the Nasdaq stock exchange, Bernard L. Madoff’s investment web site, it is appropriately in black for mourning. One investor has already committed suicide. And we used to look down our self-righteous anglo noses at Latin America for its corruption? Please.

Are we getting the point yet? It is one thing for Alexis de Tocqueville to talk about “self interest rightly understood” in 1830 when people still had a Judeo-Christian moral foundation … now we are not talking about the invisible hand of the market being self interest, but the cloaked hand of naked greed unchecked by any kind of morality. And while the ship is sinking, Limbaugh and Hanity keep ranting and raving against democrats and liberals and about ‘personal responsibility’(and what about 'social' responsability?) and the land of 'free market' opportunity (that dawg don’t hunt no more), the Republican national committee is already attacking our President-elect even before he is sworn in (click here), and the lunatic left is also attacking our new President for reaching out a conciliatory hand to moderate evangelicals by inviting Rick Warren to offer a prayer at the inaugural. This is ideological mystification of the body politic in the extreme.

And it is not just the banks, automakers, congress, the federal non-regulators and CEO’s that are the problem: WE ARE all the problem. We have all caved into greed, the housing bubble, and rampant credit card debt. We have all sinned and fallen short (Romans 3:23) … trickle-down economics has turned into trickle-down self-indulgent greed … we have become a society of Mr Potters and there are no George Baileys around to rescue us. The U.S. has become Pottersville and the bill has come due. We have turned politics into a uncivil war … the “politics of destruction” that Clinton warned us about. “My friends” (to quote John McCain) we have met the enemy and the enemy is us.

It is time to rethink our paradigm. Are we fed up enough yet? If there are any George Baileys out there, they probably invested with Madoff and are now, on Christmas Eve, standing on the bridge thinking about jumping. Where are the good angels when you need them? Clarence, Monica, or Gabriel, are you out there? Right now would be a really good time for a little help. Merry flippin Christmas everyone ... this year the grinch wins.

People of faith challenge Democrats

Yahoo News

Donald Miller, a 37-year-old author from Portland, Ore., is little known to most voters but revered among many young evangelicals for his best-selling spiritual memoir "Blue Like Jazz

Miller was a loyal Republican but said he left the party, in large part, because he thought Republicans pandered to evangelicals on abortion and gay marriage to win votes without accomplishing much.

Democrats are "reaching out to us, and I'm not naive as to why — they want our votes," said Miller, who gave a two-minute prayer to close Monday's convention session. "But they won't get them and keep them unless they continue the momentum of adopting policies that promote the sanctity of life."

Miller cited progress along those lines — including on abortion. His other priorities — poverty, global warming — also reflect a widening evangelical agenda that might benefit Democrats, if not in large numbers in November then in future elections. Miller also said he'd leave the party if some Democrats keep mocking people of faith…

…That freedom also was evident when Bishop Charles Blake, head of the 6 million-member Church of God in Christ, spoke of "disregard for the lives of the unborn." Blake, who called himself a pro-life Democrat, challenged Obama to adopt policies to reduce abortions and chided Republicans for not caring about "those who have been born."

Cardinal Ratzinger on Religious Dialogue

“If we are ever to attain a planetary consensus on the reasonableness of certain moral principles--such as that to which the Western tradition of natural law and nearly all other cultures once aspired--we will need to interact far more deeply than anyone as yet has done with the Indian tradition of karma, the Chinese tradition of the Rule of Heaven, and the Islamic tradition of the will of Allah.”

--Cardinal Ratzinger in 2004 in a debate with Philosopher Jürgen Habermas.

THE USES AND MISUSES OF KARMA

Hi Mike, that was an intriguing statement. Would you care to expand on that?

Hey John, you are probably right. In learning how to swim in the secular pluralistic sea-change, I fumble a lot. It reminds me of when I was attempting to learn Spanish. After two years of study, and six months of living in Colombia, I got up to make announcements about a picnic in Spanish. What I intended to say, was “I want everyone to BRING extra drinks and food so that we can all have a good time.” I mispronounced the Spanish word for “bring,” (traer) and instead I used “get drunk” (tragar). What everyone heard was “I want you all to GET DRUNK and pig out so that we can have a good time!” oops.

Anytime we set out to learn a new language, worldview or culture, we must be willing to make lots of mistakes. There is no other way to learn to talk in Spanish or French, but to start out blabbing nonsense like a toddler…perfectionists never learn foreign languages, or if they do, they never use them.

I tend to be an extremist and to go overboard when I am ‘on the chase’, especially when it involves crossing cultural barriers. When I was learning Spanish, I read a Spanish bible, I watched Spanish movies, I listened cassette tapes of the Psalms in Spanish as I was going to sleep, I went to Mexican restaurants and eat tacos, I worshiped with Spanish worship music, and even read comic books in Spanish.

Now I feel that God has pointed me toward secular postmoderns. My method for learning to comprehend and speak in secular postmodern is basically the same. So, please bear with me while I learn to talk all over again like a two-year-old.

Having said that, there are a couple of points you raised that I would like to probe. In both of your emails, you used the word “unbiblical.” In my mind, unbiblical and biblical are tricky words, especially if we use them in black and white categories. A large portion of evangelical Christianity believes that speaking in tongues is unbiblical. A couple of centuries ago, slavery was largely considered biblical by the general public, and established churches. I would consider house churches as biblical, but not all my friends would agree with me.

I am not an expert on Eastern religions, so there are probably all kinds of theological implications of karma that I don’t know about, depending on which branch or school of Hinduism defines it (a little like Christianity don’t you think?). However, most of my secular postmodern friends don’t know anything about the actual theology of Hinduism either, they just use “karma” as “what goes around, comes around.” The law of reciprocity. Sowing and reaping.

I’m not sure that it helps to try to explain theological points about the work of Christ to secular postmoderns until there a communicative relationship is established. In fact, as soon as I wrote the previous sentence, I became quite sure that it does not help to explain theological points about Christ or his work in erasing bad karma without establishing a bridge of communication. Besides, right there, at that time and place in the Tampa airport, I had only one shot to establish rapport with that girl. After using the positive energy and karma metaphor, she gave me her email address and wrote a couple of times. She would not have done that if I had tried to go ‘theological’ or ‘Christian’ with her.

Sometimes in our attempts to “get out of the box” we just end up in a bigger box. In our attempts to get of an ‘evangelical’ box or a ‘church’ box, we can end up in the ‘Christian’ or “biblical’ box (here is where I might get myself in trouble). I don’t think we are called to be Christians, or to be ‘biblical’ … we are called to follow Jesus, even when he leads us into the middle of a bunch of new age Hindus or a bunch of radical _______ (like G. H.). I came across a great quote the other day, of all people by Garrison Keiller, of the Prairie Home Companion. He said, “Give up your good Christian life and come and follow Jesus.”

I heard Charles Simpson back in the late 1980s teach on the epochal change we are now in the middle of. He compared it to the dispersion of national Israel and the exile to Babylon. Daniel had to live, study and work with magicians, sorcerers, warlocks, and soothsayers. He had to learn to practice his faith without being adversarial in the pluralistic environment he was in. Some of the Jews were bitter (weeping by the river). They might have accused him of being unbiblical and un-Jewish.

We are in a similar situation today. We are surrounded by new agers, postmoderns, and secular people living in a spiritual void with a confusing hodgepodge of quasi-magical and mystical beliefs drawn from a half dozen world religions. We can try to correct their unbiblical use of spiritual terminology or we can try to understand the meanings behind the terms and use them to establish a relational communication process that may ultimately lead them to Jesus. Or, we can retreat into Christian ghettos and avoid having to learn their language.

I hope that helps clarify my intentions. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

THE DANGERS OF IDEALISM AND ELITISM

For the context of our original discussion, go to:
Covenant Thinklings: Scheduled for Retirement?


I want to respond a little more to Brian’s “high dudgeon” post (it is around 90 or 91 in the thread). It shook me a little bit and caused me to do some internal inventory.

Basically, I want to underscore my agreement with his points and highlight how important his comments were. There is nothing I personally dislike more than “insider” thinking and elitist attitudes. Next to that, what I most dislike is idealism, in the sense of romanticizing certain conceptual ideals as more ‘pure’.

It seems to me that this is always the greatest danger in times of transition and renewal. There is a legitimate dissatisfaction that comes at the end of an age, and a restlessness for what ever is coming in the new. The dangerous trap is to fall into a critical spirit toward what has gone before and is need of change, and to enter into the new out of a reaction to the old. When we try to do “new” out of reaction to the old, we will almost always end up reproducing what we don’t like in the old. Gothard calls that the power of a ‘negative’ focus.

Two key teachings in the last 20 years have impacted me in this area of transitions. One, by Charles Simpson, dealt with transitional leaders in periods of epochal change. He gave this series in 1986, and used the dispersion of national Israel with the Babylonian captivity as his chief example. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, and Nehemiah were all key transitional leaders, called to help lead God’s people through a brutal and abrupt change of epochs. Simpson talked about the dangers of shipwreck in navigating around the horn, because of the confusion that comes when two oceans come together with differing tides and wave patterns. I remember the emotional impact it had on me when he said “even experienced ship captains experience shipwreck in this transition.”

The second one was by Bob Mumford last fall in October, in Columbus, Ohio. He gave a brilliant talk on God’s “Five-Hundred-Year Steps in History” referring to the epochal changes with the coming of Christ, the Constantinian church, the rift between Eastern and Western Christianity at the end of the first millennium, and the Reformation of the church. In each period of change, according to Mumford’s thesis, God is having to release the kingdom of God from the stifling grasp of the old wineskin, in order to allow the kingdom to break out into the world. Mumford predicted that God was in the process of shaking the ‘modern’ church, in order to release the activity of the kingdom into the world once again, and to raise up a ‘postmodern’ church (his words, not mine).

These two series, plus all of the statistics compiled by Barna, Neighbors (where do we go from here), Gallup, David Barrett (World Christian Encyclopedia) The house church folks, Brian McLaren, Neil Cole and more recently Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, tend to persuade me that we are in another major period of epochal sea-change, both in our culture and in the church.

Brian’s warning about the danger of seeking ‘pure’ forms of “New Testament” Christianity and church life are well founded. All throughout history, groups have splintered off from the church and isolated themselves from the ‘universal’ church in their attempts to be ‘pure’ and to be ‘true’ New Testament churches. At worst, they have quite often fallen into spiritual pride (the worst kind), elitism, and insider thinking, or even sectarian heresy. At best, they have just stagnated and become irrelevant.

We were part of a group that fell into this kind of romantic idealism and reaction against the larger church in the mid-70s. To our credit, we listened to our critics and managed to humble ourselves and stay connected with the body of Christ. Brian pointed out the romantic idealism of the ‘family-values’ group. I would say the same thing about the house church movement. Most of them are people I would not want to spend time with because they are so negative toward the church and reactionary toward anything that they consider ‘traditional’ church.

Brian is quite right in pointing out that we do not know which spiritual DNA will prove healthy and adaptive for the church. It is a “living system’ after all, operating on the edge of chaos. None of us know if we have the right DNA. I am glad that Hirsch puts the “Lordship of Christ” at the center of the mDNA.

One other thing I will point out is the attitude of Jesus and the apostles to the Jewish religion during another huge epochal change. Although Jesus wept over Jerusalem, and brusquely confronted the religious leaders, he did not seem interested in attacking or challenging Judaism or the system of Synagogue worship. He was after the ‘fulfillment’ the law, not its destruction. Paul also honored Judaism and tried to fit in with it as much as he could without betraying his core convictions about the avenues of grace.

I probably am most critical of my own conservative Evangelical background because I have seen and experienced many of the shortcomings up-close and personal: in my own life and in my own family. Within that, I am also most critical of my own mistakes as a Evangelical-Charismatic missionary, pastor and church planter.

This has caused me to be more open to other expressions of faith, such as Catholicism and Orthodoxy. While I have serious reservations about the ultimate value of mega-churches, I was instrumental in helping my friend Bill Carp find a role in one of the best and most missional mega-churches here in Miami, and both Bill and the senior pastor, Kevin are very close friends. I highly respect their heart for the marginal and the hurting and they are making an impact on our city.

So here is the challenge that Brian brought to us. How do we discern those areas in the church that must adapt in order for the church to be effective in the new epoch, without reacting to the change? How do we experiment with new approaches, without making our friends in established congregations feel that we are questioning value of their experience of ecclesia?

How do we keep ourselves open to change and innovation while loving the whole body of Christ? How do we adapt to the changes in our culture, while cherishing and drawing from our heritage and our history? It may feel like walking on the edge of a sword, and yet we dare not fall off to the left or the right. We need to hear the sill small voice that says “this is the way.” As Robert and Brian have been rightly pointing out, this is a significant challenge in navigating through troubled waters and changing tides and seas.