Epiphaneia is pleased to announce that Chris Seay will be joining us for Kingdom Economy. Chris is pastor of Ecclesia Houston, author of a number of books and one of the catalysts behind Advent Conspiracy and The Voice. He's also one of the best speakers we've ever heard and we're delighted that he'll be there!
Everywhere you go today, at least in most theological circles, the cry is raised against capitalism as an evil, oppressive system that must be smashed violently or at least overcome and abolished by peaceful, democratic means. The means by which we resist it may be debated, but the evil of capitalism itself is seldom questioned. The recent recession and global debt crisis have given the anti-capitalist crusaders more ammunition and motivation to renew the attacks on market based economic systems as harmful to the environment, unjust to the poor and full of systemic violence.
This ideological conviction is often found to be closely associated with a number of other verities of the left, such as a deep suspicion of and harshly judgmental attitude toward Western civilization, a sympathy for Marxist or neo-Marxist ideas, feminist attitudes toward patriarchy, and the belief that equality is a higher value than freedom.
Capitalism is a modern ideology that arose at the time of the European Enlightenment on the basis of a Deistic worldview and a naïve faith in the power of human reason to penetrate the nature of reality unaided either by revelation, which was dismissed as superstition, or by tradition, which was patronized as the attitudes of the human race in its relative infancy. Capitalism was developed as a totalizing system of thought in which vices like greed no longer had to be overcome because they could be managed in such a way that even a race of devils could preside over a just society providing that they used reason to discover and implement a capitalist system of economics.
It all sounds too good to be true and, of course, it is too good to be true on several counts. First, human reason was never regarded as having such a high degree of autonomy by classical Augustinian-Thomist Christianity and it is no longer regarded in this way even by the postmodernist heirs of the Enlightenment. If St. Augustine would regard Adam Smith as a Pelagian, Foucault would unmask him as the ideological spokesman for the rich and powerful. Secondly, when the undoubtedly valid insights of capitalism into methods of economic organization are generalized or elevated to a level of a total world view, they fail because they are not grounded in a metaphysics that is capable of supporting a world view that accounts sufficiently for human nature. The Christian understanding of humans as being created for love cannot be contained within capitalism as a total world view or system. Thirdly, both classical Christians and modern Christian socialists are aware of the fact that human nature is in need of change and that any just and humane economic system requires a new kind of human person. St. Augustine, of course, would speak of the problem of original sin and St. Aquinas would advocate the necessity of virtue, while even the ideologues of the old USSR spoke often of the “new Soviet man.” Christian democratic socialists believe that it is Christian love, working through politics that is the needed inspiration for a democratic socialist society and for overcoming capitalism.
But to criticize capitalism as inadequate is not the same as throwing out every aspect of capitalism as if it were safe and reasonable to swing over to capitalism’s opposite – namely socialism. In many ways, socialism is capitalism’s evil twin and shares a lot of its DNA with its sibling rival. Socialism is also a modern ideology that is totalizing in its intentions, utopian in its aspirations and Pelagian in its anthropology. Socialism suffers from the same defect as Nineteenth century robber baron capitalism in that it places too much power in the hands of a small elite. Applied to the modern state, socialism takes the form of a bureaucratic rationality which stifles individuality and human dignity in the name of an equality of outcome imposed arbitrarily from above. In my opinion, the main problem with socialism is not that it is inefficient (although it is that), but rather that it undermines the dignity of the individual and the responsibility of the individual to choose to obey the natural law and the moral law. If reason and conscience make us uniquely human, our very humanness is at stake in modern, bureaucratic, state socialism. My argument is not that we must retain elements of capitalism (as the Communist Party of China does) because capitalism is efficient in stimulating production of needed goods and services. (A socialist government must have goodies to dole out or it collapses. This is the lesson China learned from the events of 1989.) My argument is rather the more counter intuitive one that capitalism contains within itself certain ideals that are necessary to a just and humane society – all questions of economic efficiency aside.
If we are seeking for a model of economics that may point the way forward for us, I believe we have to work our way free of modernist, Enlightenment assumptions about human nature, reason and the nature of God. The question I want to highlight here is “What pre-modern assumptions are embodied in at least some versions of capitalism that are worth keeping precisely because they representative alternatives to the modern ideologies that many of us regard as failures today?” I would make a list as follows:
Individual liberty
Religious freedom
Free enterprise
Personal responsibility
Limited government
The division of powers
The rule of law
Natural law
I could go on about each one of these points in detail but space does not permit. My point in mentioning these ideas is that each one of them is pre-modern, each one is a necessary good for a just and humane society in a fallen world, and each one is threatened by socialism.
What I am suggesting is that any just and humane economic system that Christians could approve of in this fallen world would need to include these ideas in it and that, therefore, simply to reject capitalism and to embrace socialism is not an adequate response in the contemporary situation. We should not throw out the babies of liberty, religious freedom, free enterprise, personal responsibility, limited government, the division of powers, the rule of law and recognition of natural law in throwing out the capitalist (and modernist) bathwater because, if we do, we will likely end up with something that looks more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, than the kingdom of shalom described by the ancient Hebrew prophets.
With just under a month to go, Epiphaneia is gearing up for our fourth installment of The Evolving Church. We're excited. Some of you are excited. Becky Garrison is definitely excited.
If you haven't looked into it already, we highly recommend taking a peak at the Community Learning Package. You get our cheapest registration rate ever, plus a ton of resources to go through with your Community afterwards. Oh, and don't forget that you get two tickets to Eighth Letter which is going to be like nothing we've ever seen or done before. In other words, it's going to be amazing, or at least we think so.
Also, please note that the early registration deadline is March 31- after which ALL prices jump.
Karl Marx was, among other things, often a perceptive observer of capitalism. He once admiringly referred to it as "a machine for destroying limits." By this he meant that our economic system had ways of innovating around what were thought to be barriers to increased trade or production or even longevity or better health. What I want to suggest is that our economic system is also a machine for destroying our moral limits. We read about the abuses of the environment or of workers from the left or the glorification of a nihilistic culture from the right. Are these aberrations or part of the systemic nature of 21st Century capitalism?
Consider that the archetypal business form of our time is the corporation: a legal "person" created for the purpose of doing business. As Joel Bakan points out in The Corporation, this "person" is created for the sole purpose of enriching its shareholders. Now, for those of us with pension plans invested in these "persons" this is actually quite a nice thing. Here's an entity with ample legal protection whose only task is to make more money for your retirement and mine. Of course the inverse of this is that the corporation does not have the other concerns that you or I or other actual persons might have - again it's sole concern is to make money. What would you or I call a person who was pathologically consumed with kind of drive? Bakan goes with the clinical definition, "psychopath." I'll refer you to Bakan if you want to quibble with that definition, but even if you aren't prepared to throw DSM-IV at the corporation, I think we could agree on something like "jerk". Now this particular jerk's motto is not so much "if it feels good, do it," but rather, "if it makes money, do it.
As Christians we seem fairly comfortable with a system that pools our impulse to greed and uses it to exploit others (and often ourselves). It becomes disconnected from us, we do not think of wealth accumulation as "greed" but as "sound financial planning" or "just business." Here's a thought experiment: what jobs would your pastor ask you to resign from because they are considered immoral? (Or, if you are a pastor reading this, what jobs would you challenge your congregants to resign from?) I can picture only an obstetrician-gynecologist who performed abortions or a sex-trade worker being challenged about their career choices. What we do at work otherwise seems to be a zone around which the church tends not to penetrate too deeply.
Now before you start raising the objection that calling our economic model psychopathic is some kind of leftist commie socialist critique, let me point out that the other side agrees. I'll refer you to no less than Milton Friedman who wrote thatthe only social responsibility of business is to increase profits. It is not enough, in Friedman's argument that corporations are singleminded about profits, it is rather that they ought to be singleminded about profits. In other words a corporation shouldbe a psychopath. While Marxism is explicit in its materialist atheism, the implicit message of capitalism - that increasing profits is the highest good - may well be implicitly atheist. Certainly notable atheist pro-capitalist Ayn Rand saw capitalism as more compatible with enlightenment rationalism than with religion or "mysticism" as she called it.
This existing order has, in our society, generally invoked two sets of intellectual responses - a left-wing one and a right-wing one - that Slavoj Žižek characterizes thusly:
“In short, the right-wing intellectual is a knave, a conformist who refers to the mere existence of the given order as an argument for it, and mocks the Left on account of its ‘utopian’ plans, which necessarily lead to catastrophe; while the left-wing intellectual is a fool, a court jester who publicly displays the lie of the existing order, but in a way which suspends the performative efficiency of his speech.”
In other words the response on the right is to throw up one's hands and accept that this is the way things are while the response on the left is to point out what is wrong with the system while simultaneously participating in it. Lots of corporate publishing houses and film studios have done very well by the works of left-wing critics like Michael Moore or Naomi Klein or the aforementioned Joel Bakan.
The church has meanwhile been more likely in North America to join the camp of those that would throw up their hands and accept that this is the way it is. The other common response among some Christians has been the Wendell Berry sort of "back to the land" idea that gets pilloried here in a way that I think describes the impossibility of going backwards. I'll go along with Marx instead and agree that a lot of the limits demolished by capitalism have actually improved our lives. It has after all worked better for more people than either slavery or feudalism. But is capitalism then the final, perfected system? Are we accepting that we should pool our resources into legal fictions that act as psychopaths to enrich us? Here I would like to share something else that Žižek said about Marxism: When describing in what meaningful way he could still call himself a Marxist, Žižek said it was only in the sense that he believed that there was another system coming after capitalism. In other words, we are not at the end of history as Fukuyama suggested. Is this not also the belief of the church, that another age is coming? Is this not our great hope - however we might differ in the specifics from Žižek - that something is coming after this?
Whatever kingdom economics will look like, I imagine it will be quite different from what we have now. The Marxists are right, there is still another system coming.
The good news is not first and foremost a message that gives hope for the afterlife; the good news is not first and foremost a message that one may have inner peace and tranquility; the good news is not first and foremost that one may experience an 'authentic' life; the good news is, first and foremost, a proclamation that the long anticipated rule and reign of God has now come in the midst of human history. The good news proclaims that we may participate in God's new creation if we will repent and accept the new reality.
- Lee C. Camp, Mere Discipleship
With the conference only five weeks away, I thought I would take things back to the beginning and examine what I believe to be the basis for all that will be discussed on April 10thth. From my point of view, it all comes back to these words of Jesus: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe the good news” (Mark 1:15, NRSV). It is here that all those who wish to follow Jesus are invited to completely reorient their lives and bear witness to the reality that, through Christ, a different way of living has now been made possible.
According to James Dunn, the call to repentance as expressed by Jesus “would have initially been heard as a reiteration of the call of the prophets to turn back to God, that is, by implication, from a life in breach of God’s commandments, from a social irresponsibility which should have been unacceptable in the people of Yahweh;” it is a call “to radically alter the manner and direction of their whole life, in its basic motivations, attitudes and objectives, for a society to radically reform its communal goals and values.” It is a call to determined positive action, taking tangible steps to align one’s life with the Way of Jesus. It requires a decision to leave one way of life and set out on another. In the words of Lee C. Camp, repentance must lead to change; “without change, without deep thoroughgoing change, one could not enter and participate in the kingdom.” Jesus, therefore, was calling people to literally change the course and shape of their present daily lives with a view to impacting the world around them in positive and meaningful ways. Repentance is not solely about personal confession and transformation, but also involves a level of social responsibility in accordance to the arrival of the kingdom of God among us.
Furthermore, the call to repentance is qualified by the call ‘to believe’, whereby Jesus was calling all those that would follow him not to a new set of rules and principles to adhere to, nor to some sort of life-saving equation of repentance and belief equals eternal life in heaven, but to reshape their lives according to his message of good news. He was calling them, according to Dunn, to adopt a new “attitude, an orientation of life, a worldview or mind-set rooted in their innermost being ...a fundamental conviction that motivated and gave character to the whole range of daily living and relationships;” to truly believe, therefore, “requires a personal, trusting, relational involvement in this comprehensive reordering of reality.” Within the context of powerful and oppressive political, social and religious systems that sought to set themselves as the highest authorities and to absorb all people under their destructive ways, Jesus introduced an alternative Way of living in the world with his proclamation of ‘good news’ for all. He was calling all those that wished to follow him to a life of transforming faith, a complete reorientation of how they were to go about their daily lives. Kingdom economy begins, therefore, with repentance and belief, a literal turning away from the old and believing that through Christ, a different way of living has been made possible.
The implications of this become evident as Jesus begins to call specific people to participate in this different way of living. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus calls specific people to specific actions; in Matthew 4:19, for example, he said to Simon and Andrew, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” While it is to be noted that these first disciples are described as having instantly dropped their nets in response to the call of Jesus, it must not be understated to what extent they sacrificed their old way of life to begin afresh. This giving up of the old way of life is described by Dietrich Bonhoeffer as an act wherein “the (participant) is thrown out of relative security of life into complete insecurity; out of the foreseeable and calculable realm into the completely unforeseeable, coincidental realm; out of the realm of limited possibilities and into the realm of unlimited possibilities.” The call to participate in the economy of the Kingdom is a call that separates the participants from their previous existence. One must be careful, therefore, not to assume that specific commands that Jesus made to individuals in the Gospels are to be read as universal in relation to all that may wish to follow him; what is central, according to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is the question of whether or not one will trust in the Word of Jesus Christ that has been and continues to be spoken among us, believing it to be a stronger foundation than all the securities of the world.
While the call to participate in the kingdom economy involves sacrifice, and the giving up of the old for the new may not always be an easy proposition, the good news of Jesus’ call is that to deny one’s self and follow him is to begin down a road that can literally change the world. Walter Brueggemann explains it well when he says that would-be participants in God’s kingdom are called to follow a God “who disrupts the lives of settled people, who gives them a vocation that marks life by inconvenience and risk.” At the same time, “the ground of the call is the good news of the gospel that God has a powerful intentionality for the world, which, when enacted, will make a decisive difference for good in the world." To answer the call to follow Jesus and participate in the new economy of his kingdom come is to hear the Word of God spoken afresh through him, and to reorient one’s life according to the reality of that kingdom now present in the world. What this looks like in reality will be different for all of us, but may we be willing to make the necessary sacrifices in order to demonstrate to the world that the call of Jesus has not fallen on deaf ears.
Repentance and belief: this is the necessary starting point of all things kingdom economy and the decisive difference for good that it offers to the world today.
Ian lives in Guelph with his wife Lauren where he works with at risk youth and for Christian Horizons. Ian and Lauren both blog at table for two.
