A Living Economic Testimony: Debt
October 13, 2011 § 9 Comments
I woke up yesterday morning thinking about debt, the linchpin of our current economic crisis, about the systematic assaults on the compassionate and indeed rational management of debt that began with the Reagan administration, and about what Jesus’ teachings and our other Quaker testimonies have to offer as places to start in articulating a living testimony on debt.
Amongst ourselves: contemporary and historical practice
Friends historically have urged each other to avoid debt when possible and, since credit is essential to business, to be very careful not to become overextended with the debt you must incur. They saw this as a breach of what we call today the testimony of integrity; then, they said it broke Jesus’ injunction to let your yea be yea and your nay be nay—that is, when you defaulted on your debts you were breaking your word. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Friends kept a close watch on each other’s finances and disciplined those who defaulted on their debts. For a while, some meetings read people out of meeting for going bankrupt, especially in the 19th century. Nevertheless, meetings sometimes also arranged bailouts, covering the outstanding debts of bankrupted members, especially when the creditors were not Friends, in order to do right by the creditors and to protect the Society’s reputation. It also was not too uncommon for meetings to refinance such a Friend, especially if their business had failed through no fault of their own.
Through the twentieth century, Friends assumed many of ‘the world’s’ practices, including attitudes toward debt, while banks extended more and more credit to the individual consuming household. Today, if the Quaker community reflects trends in the wider society, as it almost certainly does, then presumably, quite a few Friends are underwater with their mortgages and in trouble with their credit card debt. But how would we know? And what would we do about it if we did know? We no longer monitor each other’s finances and we do not step in with help when members get into financial trouble. Should we? I think so.
In fact, ideally, perhaps Quaker meetings could function like the Church of the Savior in Washington DC (and the early Christian church; see the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5) when it comes to finances: ask for a financial statement as part of the membership process and for a covenantal relationship with the meeting regarding money. This would go a long way toward solving our meetings’ problems with their own insolvency, though it would drive out some members and thus reduce income, as well. For its part, meetings could also establish relief funds, the way the Mormons do, and perhaps even ‘mandatory’ periodic social service to each other, also along the lines of Mormon practice, as a way to protect and to reboot a struggling household’s fortunes.
Of course this will never happen. It will never even come up. Despite the many sociological studies that show that demanding more of your believers actually grows a congregation, Friends will almost certainly see such a practice as invasive and coercive, never mind that we did it for almost 200 years. Nevertheless, I think we should do everything we can to encourage our members to tell us when they’re in trouble and to help to the degree that we can. As niggardly as Friends are towards contributions to our meetings and institutions, we often respond quite generously to direct appeals for specific and personalized causes. Perhaps the best way to build up a fund that could help struggling members is to run something akin to a capital drive to raise funds for a new meetinghouse or for major repairs to an existing one. Without such a fund and without a clear willingness on the part of the meeting to help, deeply indebted members are not likely to come forward.
During the persecutions, Friends managed to help each other out against terrible, sustained and concerted financial assault. Likewise, the early apostolic church was organized around care for the poor, vividly dramatized in Acts 2 and 4. Do we share such a fellowship today?
American Spring
October 11, 2011 § 12 Comments
One of the goals of my research and writing on Quakers and capitalism is to bring historical perspective to a call for a living testimony on economic justice. The movement that began as Occupy Wall Street has spread to other cities around the country and may, I hope, become a truly national movement, the beginning of an American Spring that, like the Arab Spring that has brought regime change to Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, will bring regime change to America. The regime that needs changing here in the U.S. is the dominion of corporate interests and the interests of the very wealthy over the interests of the rest of us.
The press has made much of the apparent incoherence of the Occupy movement and its lack of clearly defined goals. However, as Walter Bruegemann has said (I think it was him; it might have been Dorothy Soelle), prophecy begins as lamentation. The first step in prophetic movement toward justice is recognizing and naming your suffering. That’s the stage the Occupy movement is in right now, it seems to me.
However, in what I see so far, a clear thread does run through their rather chaotic and scattershot message: the hijacking of our economics, our democracy and political culture, our social culture and social welfare, our food and water supplies, our media—and our minds, really—by the 1% of Americans that own 50% of our wealth. We are the 99%. Jesus would have named this condition Mammon—greed, ill-gotten wealth, the oppressive interests of the rich.
The American Spring represents a historic opportunity for the Religious Society of Friends to join the conversation, to develop for ourselves for the first time, really, a clearly articulated set of goals toward economic justice and to bring our witness to the movement. Where do we Quakers stand? What do we have to offer? How are we led by the Holy Spirit to testify to truth?
This is one of those areas where having your Quaker roots firmly planted in Christian scripture really pays off (though not, sadly, traditional Christian theology). Economic justice was the very heart of Jesus’ mission. The synoptic gospels offer enough planks in the platform of the kingdom of God to build a movement on, or to base your testimony upon. Jesus’ foundation for what I like to call the commonwealth of God is incredibly rich. It is both radical and practical. It is concrete, coherent and comprehensive. It speaks truth to power and it speaks to a very large percentage of American society from a position of authority that they already acknowledge as important if not supreme—Christian faith. It speaks directly to the plight of the poor and to the dissolving middle class and to the segments of right wing politics and policy that favor big money over little people. It speaks to those who distort the gospel and would bring evangelical economics into government. (See Chris Lehman’s cover story in the October issue of Harper’s titled “Pennies from Heaven: How Mormon Economics Shape the GOP.”) And it speaks directly to the central issue of our current crisis: debt, debt relief and, especially, home foreclosure.
Meanwhile, without this scriptural foundation, liberal Friends are left (so far) with preaching that there is that of God in everyone and adapting generalities from the testimony of equality into the economic sphere—not bad as far as it goes. We could also recover the writings of George Fox that speak directly to economic justice, or Woolman’s A Plea for the Poor, or the Eight Principles of a Just Social Order published by London Yearly Meeting in 1918, though these earlier Quaker manifestos would bring us back to the Christian gospel again.
So we are not totally bereft, even if we do not employ Christian scripture and the planks in the platform of the commonwealth of God that Jesus lived and taught, though I believe it would be a shame to leave these aside. Virtually all of our other testimonies, not just the testimony of equality, translate in some way to the economic sphere. And the incipient divine-spark theology implicitly understood by Friends in the belief that there is that of God in everyone holds promise. We just need to develop it further and demonstrate how it reflects the guidance we are receiving from the Spirit.
For that is the true meaning of ‘testimony’ for Friends: not that we have an outward set of principles that we try to uphold in our individual and corporate lives, but that these are the ways in which the Light has transformed our inner lives, not just as a historical legacy, but today, right now, in each of us. These are the outward ways in which God is leading us inwardly to testify to God’s truth.
In subsequent posts I want to develop these two strands of tradition further—Jesus’ teachings on economic life and the potential implicit in our liberal ‘theology’ and our current testimonies. And I want to begin exploring their implications for action in this potentially historic time. And I hope my readers will join in this conversation. And I plan to visit some of the Occupy groups in my area to see what they really are up to, rather than rely on reports in the media, and to explore how Friends might contribute.
What if Friends all over the country did the same?
Quakerism & Capitalism — Transition (1895-1920): The Limited Liability Corporation
June 30, 2011 § Leave a comment
When London Yearly Meeting approved the Foundations of a True Social Order after discussing the report of the Committee on War and the Social Order during the 1918 sessions, the sense of the meeting was that the social order—that is, capitalism—had played a key role in causing the war that was still crippling an entire generation. In the Foundations, one can see this relatively new awareness of capitalism as a system with potentially horrible social consequences reaching beyond a narrow focus on the war to include labor and industrial relations as well (the British Labour Party was constituted in the same year). In fact, British Friends declared that nothing less than the ‘personality’—the personhood of the human—was at risk in the ways that the system treated its participants.
Personhood was central to the discussion in part because full legal ‘personhood’ had been conferred decisively upon the limited liability corporation in Britain and America only twenty years before. In that short time, the new technology had completely transformed the capitalist system. It was also completely transforming British Quakerism.
It’s hard to exaggerate how momentous this innovation was. The modern corporation, wrote Peter Drucker, the preeminent business thinker of the 20th century, “was the first autonomous institution in hundreds of years, the first to create a power center that was within society yet independent of the central government of the national state.” * (The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, John Micklethwaite and Adrian Wooldridge, Modern Library Edition, New York, 2003)
The idea was not new. The Limited Liability Act of 1855 (in Britain) had granted limited liability to companies incorporated under the Joint Stock Companies
Act of 1844, subject to some capital requirements. The earlier act had done away with the need to get a special charter from Parliament to form a company, requiring only simple registration. The system was further rationalized under the Joint Stock Companies act of 1856, requiring only seven people to sign a Memorandum of Association and to put “ltd” at the end of the company’s name. However, the final block was put in place when, in 1897, in Salomon v. Saloman & Co., Ltd., the House of Lords (which was then Britain’s Supreme Court) finally firmly established the separate legal identity of a company and conferred upon its directors—not just its shareholders—the ‘corporate veil’ of protection. The corporation had become the equivalent of a person before the law.
Limited liability meant that shareholders were only financially liable for the value of their own investment in the company and that, when someone sued the company, they were suing the company and not its owners or investors. It essentially made the company in some ways the equivalent of a person in terms of the law. This affected not just financial liability; it also simplified a host of other financial, legal and management problems: by wrapping responsibility up in the fiction of corporate ‘personhood’, a company’s business relations and transactions no longer had to be conducted with each of its individual shareholders as owners. All this made it possible to raise the capital necessary to form the kind of large companies that the mature industrial economy required and to run them with managerial efficiency.
The proceedings of LYM’s 1918 sessions reveal that some members of the Meeting were nervous about the very essence of this innovation: was it morally right to relieve the owners of a business from responsibility for its actions? This seemed inconsistent with moral principle. It also struck at the heart of the Protestant Spirit that had dominated Quaker business practice for two centuries (and which had only just been defined in Max Weber’s landmark book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), in which one viewed one’s business as an expression of one’s religious calling. That only worked if you owned and ran the business yourself. It didn’t work if untold numbers of people owned the business through investment shares who then relegated the business’s operations to directors and managers, and whose legal responsibility for its actions were now severely limited.
But that debate about limited liability went nowhere. In the proceedings of the 1918 sessions, you see some Friends arguing forcefully for the moral contradictions involved, which even the supporters of the new technology had trouble refuting. But it was too late. The modern corporation had already completely taken over. It was obvious to everyone that it was now, not just a fait accompli, but also actually indispensable to the new social order.
This fact was literally demoralizing to those Friends who considered it. At just the moment when Friends had become aware for the first time of capitalism as a system with mixed moral consequences, they were forced to accept its amoral (was it actually immoral?) character. In retreat, London Yearly Meeting resolved to reform the system as best they could, responding with one of the signature acts of modern liberal Quakerism—they formed a committee. The Committee on Industry and the Social Order went on to do some of the most searching and challenging work in the history of Quaker social testimony. But Friends had effectively abandoned any direct challenge to capitalism itself on moral grounds.
Moreover, the limited liability corporation did more than challenge the moral identity of British Friends. It also destroyed their sizable fortunes. Many Quaker business owners held onto their family ownership for a long time, but eventually they virtually all went public. Cadbury, Rowntree, Lever Brothers, Barclay—one by one, Quaker owners became managers in firms that had been in their families for generations. Gradually over the course of the 20th century, the great Quaker fortunes of Great Britain dwindled in size and importance. For two centuries, Quakers had been the wealthiest, or one of the wealthiest, communities in the United Kingdom. Between the triumph of the limited liability corporation and later the influx of convinced Friends from the middle middle class, the social demographics of British Quakerism dramatically changed for the second time in its history: from yeoman farmers and small trades people in the 1650s, to industrialist tycoons during the 18th and 19th centuries, and then back again towards the middle classes during the 20th.
In America, things were quite different. The United States embraced the limited liability corporation earlier and with greater enthusiasm than the Brits, seeing the innovation as democratizing and recognizing early on how it served the already famous American entrepreneurial spirit. But corporate law was mostly a matter for the states to write, so the technology grew for a long time in a haphazard way as states variously began legalizing it and then began competing with each other for business. First New Jersey, and then, ultimately, Delaware, made corporation-friendly law a hallmark of state identity. As in Great Britain, these laws first emerged in the middle of the 19th century and finally coalesced into some sense of national policy toward the end of the century, but states have always retained the power of incorporation.
With the Sherman Act (1890) and subsequent anti-trust legislation, the federal government began finally to seriously regulate corporations for the first time and these efforts figured prominently in the rise of Progressivism in America. Then came the New Deal. But these developments hardly affected Quakerism in America, which had always been more economically diverse than in Great Britain. The rich Quakers of Philadelphia had not played the central role in creating capitalism that their British brethren had, they were not by and large industrialists, and they represented only a small portion of the American Quaker population, let alone of the American wealthy and power elite. Even as early as the War for Independence, Philadelphia Quakers had ceased to be very important to the nation’s economy. By the time of the second transition in Quaker economics at the end of the 19th century, the final codification and rationalization of corporate law had no real impact on Quaker culture in America.
Jesus the Christ and Quaker Economic Testimony — The Fulfillment
February 22, 2011 § 10 Comments
How does a covenantal community focused on debt relief and ministry to the poor work?
I said in the earlier posts in this series that, in Luke’s gospel, Jesus inaugurated the kingdom of God by declaring a Jubilee, a general redemption of debt and of debt slaves. How did he plan to make good on his claim to be fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy? Jesus himself raises this question in the course of the story, but he doesn’t answer it. Luke shows us how the first disciples implemented the economics of redemption in the common-wealth of God in Acts, chapters two and four. Presumably they did so according to Jesus’ teachings. There are hints elsewhere in the gospels, notably in the story of Zacchaeus and of Mary and Martha, that Jesus had already begun to organize his household churches along the lines described in detail in Acts. In Acts four and five, Luke actually gives us two case studies of how this was supposed to work, one positive and one negative. In the positive case, Barnabas “sold a field that belonged to him, then brought the money, and laid it at the apostle’s feet” (Acts 4:37).
The negative case study (Acts 5:1-12) is an astounding story much overlooked by everybody, I suspect because it’s so bizarre. Ananias and his wife Sapphira, like Barnabas, sell a piece of property, but instead of bringing all the proceeds to the apostles, they agree to secretly withhold half the proceeds. They naturally, I think, fear that they’ve joined a cult whose future looks pretty shaky—their leader has already been executed, their present leaders have already spent time in jail, the secret police are hunting them down. We can speculate that Ananias and Sapphira are hedging their bets, leaving themselves an exit strategy.
Peter knows what’s going on and challenges Ananias. Ananias denies the fraud, and then Peter says he’s lied to God and the man drops dead. Young men wrap him up, carry him out and bury him. Later, Sapphira shows up and Peter challenges her to own up to the subterfuge, but she lies too, and she drops dead. She’s buried next to her husband.
What’s happening here? What’s their crime? Was the punishment really death? Did Peter utter a death-curse? Did God really strike them dead? And what is Luke trying to tell us with this incredible story?
I believe this story encodes the first excommunication in Jesus’ community, defining both the rationale for taking action and the process for expulsion. We know the Essenes excommunicated members by performing a burial ceremony, and even today, some very conservative Jews will say that relatives who have married Gentiles are “dead to me”. This rests on the passage in Deuteronomy that famously says, “choose life”—a theology of life in the covenant and death outside the covenant (Deuteronomy 30:11-20). The first few chapters of both of Luke’s books are full of Essene influence; especially relevant in this context is the mass conversion on Pentecost recounted in Acts 2, which was also the holy day used by the Essenes to admit new members and expel unwanted members. Especially suspicious as a detail in the story is the note that the young men wrapped up Ananias’s body and then carried him out for burial—did they really prepare the body for the grave right there in the midst of the day’s ritualized distribution of money to the poor? Or was this part of the ritualized ceremony for expulsion, which would have been a public event?
So why were Ananias and Sapphira excommunicated? For filing false financial statements. More specifically, for “putting the Spirit of the Lord to the test” (Acts 5:9) by undermining the community’s commitment to care for the poor. That is, for defying the Spirit of the Lord that had anointed Jesus as the Christ, whom the Father had sent to bring good news to the poor.
So, to answer our question about how our meetings would function if we tried to follow Jesus’ intention with the good news, we would first seek to find out who among us suffers under a crushing burden of debt and who among us possesses surplus wealth that could be used to relieve this suffering. This would probably mean that financial disclosure would be an obligation of membership, for this would be the most transparent way to know who has need and who has resources. And we would set up a system for distributing the welfare.
Several of Paul’s “gifts of the spirit” (ministry, giving, leading, and showing compassion—Romans 12:6-8) seem to represent various offices in the welfare distribution system that he had set up in his churches, each one inspired by the same Spirit that Ananias and Sapphira had defied. These offices are only hinted at in the gospels and Acts, specifically, Acts 2:42: “They devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers,” all of which took place, if I’m not mistaken, at the time of the day’s main meal. “Fellowship” here is the Greek word koine, which means sharing, the sharing of food and money as well as each other’s presence.
Can you imagine organizing your meeting around these principles?
Such a radical covenant of governance, in which discipleship meant this kind of disclosure and discipline, would need to stand on a sure and clear foundation of authority. For Jesus himself and his followers—and for the early Friends—that authority was the Holy Spirit and the teachings of the Christ. Where would today’s liberal, mostly post-Christian meetings turn to for a foundation of authority that could carry such a weight? More importantly, perhaps, why would liberal meetings organize themselves this way, having mostly abandoned the teachings of Jesus as authoritative? Without the authority of the gospel, without the example of the first disciples, a meeting would realign itself toward the poor in this way only if deeply moved by the Holy Spirit—as, indeed, the first Christians were. But this is no less true for mostly Christian meetings. Would they be willing to recover the economic heart of the Christ’s teachings? Would they be any more willing to reorganize their meetings around the good news for the poor?
I propose that the gospel message of Jesus the Christ does, in fact, offer us a powerful place to start in experiencing, articulating and proclaiming a revitalized testimony on economics. But would such a testimony languish at the doorstep of action?
Here the traditional faith and practice of the Quaker testimonies comes into play. The testimonies are not, properly speaking, social action positions to which we are encouraged to subscribe as Friends. They are in theory the natural and even inevitable expressions of movements of the Spirit within and among us. The ‘written testimonies’ are the shadow and not the substance of a testimonial life, empty forms without power, until and unless the spirit of God anoints us. Once we are in-spired with compassion for the poor, the actual words of the testimony and the concrete actions of the testimonial life will follow. Without the anointing of the Holy Spirit, the good news for the poor is just a notion, an intriguing radical ideology, a matter for study and discussion.
When it comes to the poor, I myself hold only a shadow in my hands. I am the rich young man who walked away (Luke 18). I could not live in such a meeting, for a bunch of reasons. I have not surrendered authority over my life to Jesus the Christ (though he hasn’t yet come to claim it).
We believe—I believe, having experienced it myself—that each of us is called to direct inspiration by God, and that the meeting as a community is also so called, and that God is always trying to reveal to us new truth and lead us into renewed life (and by ‘God’ here I mean the Mystery Reality behind our experience of being inspired and led, however that experience manifests). This much I can do: try to open myself to God’s inspiration and revelation and guidance. Try to be faithful to the call when I hear it.
I have answered several calls; I have tried to remain faithful to them. One of them has led me to spend decades studying Jesus’ economic teachings, to write a book about them, to become something of an authority on them. Yet I’ve never let them overwhelm my own desires. I have never truly sought the fellowship of the Spirit in the sharing of wealth and the ministry to the poor. I am Ananias. I guess I am running from the shadow of the cross.
Jesus the Christ and Quaker Economic Testimony — The Proclamation
February 9, 2011 § 10 Comments
I said in my previous post that I think the Bible, and specifically, the gospel of Jesus should be one of the places we go for guidance and inspiration when trying to develop an effective and spirit-led testimony on economics. The good news is that the gospel of Jesus is, at its very heart, an economic message. Jesus defined his role as “the Christ” in specifically economic terms. To see this, though, you have to let go of our traditionally Pauline christology and even the testimony of the evangelists, and turn directly to Jesus himself. You have to ask, what did “the Christ” mean to Jesus?
Nowhere in Christian scripture does Jesus forthrightly claim, “I am the Christ, the Messiah” (christos in Greek and messiah in Hebrew both mean “anointed”). In every passage in which these words are used—but one—someone else is speaking confessionally, proclaiming Jesus as the Christ, or simply assuming it. There is one place, however (Luke 4:18), where Jesus does say the word. Moreover, though he does so indirectly, nevertheless he quite plainly claims the title for himself. Yet this passage is almost never used to define what “Christ” actually means. Why in the history of christology (the theology of who and what the Christ is) do theologians so rarely turn to Jesus himself as their starting point?
I think it’s because of how Jesus defines his ‘christ-hood’. He mentions nothing about sin or salvation. Rather, he defines the role of the messiah in terms of liberation from poverty. The Christ is a redeemer—but in the economic sense of releasing someone from their debt. Though we must add that, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus equates sin and debt (forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors), and this, in fact, reflects a deep and far-reaching connection between spiritual and financial redemption, not just in his teaching, but in the very DNA of the religion of ancient Israel.
Here’s what Jesus said in Luke 4:
Jesus has just returned to his home town after being tested in the wilderness. Barely six weeks have passed since he heard his call to prophetic mission at his baptism. He is invited to give a guest sermon at the synagogue in Nazareth. These will be the very first words of his public ministry in the gospel according to Luke. He reads from the 61st chapter of Isaiah, the first couple of verses: (I’m quoting from Isaiah below, rather than from Luke, since Luke quotes the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Torah in use in his time; but Jesus and his synagogue would have used either the Hebrew text or an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew, a Targum; the Hebrew and Septuagint versions of these verses differ a little, but without changing their substantial meaning.)
The spirit of the Lord Yahweh is upon me,
for Yahweh has anointed me (christos, messiah),
he has sent me
to bring good news (evangelion) to the poor/oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to captives
and release for the prisoners;
to proclaim the year that Yahweh favors.
After reading these verses, Jesus sits down and begins his discourse: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” That’s all he says. He has claimed: “I am the anointed one that Isaiah foretold and my mission is to bring good news to the poor—to end their poverty and oppression; specifically, to proclaim the year that my father favors—a Jubilee.”
The year of Jubilee refers to the practice defined in Leviticus 25 in which, every fifty years, all debts are cancelled, all debt slaves are set free, all families who have been alienated from their family farms due to bankruptcy and foreclosure are returned to their ancestral inheritance, and the land is to lie fallow for a year’s rest. (Actually, for a second year’s rest, since the fiftieth year follows the 49th, the end of the last of seven sabbatical years—Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15 established seven years as the maximum term for debt slavery, for paying off short-term debts with your labor, and the land was also released from labor every seven years. The Jubilee was for long-term debt.)
There is no evidence that the Jubilee was ever practiced at all, let alone every fifty years. But it was not too uncommon for kings in the ancient Near East to proclaim a Jubilee, often upon accession to the throne. It was in this context that Jesus, the anointed prophet king, claimed the authority of God’s own spirit to proclaim universal redemption—release from debt.
In the paralellism of Isaiah’s and Jesus’ poetry, in which the second line of a poetic couplet reiterates and develops the idea of the first, “the poor” are the “brokenhearted—men who have lost their family farms and must rely on day labor to support their families; the “captives” and the “prisoners” are people whose debts have completely overwhelmed them, so that they now have no prospect of paying off their debts through their labor, even in seven years; they have become permanently dependent on the holders of their notes as their servants.
Jesus’ claim to be able to fulfill all these things was laughable on its face, as he well knew: “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’” he said, for he was himself as poor as you could get. He had just spent six weeks living off the land in the desert. He must have been emaciated, his cloak full of dust and thistles, his hair matted, his eyes burning with that praeternatural shine that comes from extreme fasting. He must have looked like like that other nut, John the Baptizer.
We have to wonder ourselves how Jesus planned to pull off this outrageous claim. Luke gives us the answer in Acts, chapters two and four—new rules for community in which those with surplus wealth liquidate it for distribution to the poor (see specifically, Acts 4:34-37 for how this was supposed to work). Jesus’ answer to how he planned to fulfill such a radical promise was: that you will do it for each other. You will organize the community around the principle of koine, of fellowship, of sharing what you have to relieve each other’s suffering.
A Quaker testimony that rested on the gospel of Jesus as its foundation would likewise organize community around this kind of fellowship, offering good news to the poor and those in debt.
This has profound implications for community dynamics. It requires a completely new approach to the testimony on community, not just a new faith, but new practices, as well. Here also, the gospels (the Synoptic Gospels, anyway) and Acts offer clues as to where to start. Material for another post. . .
Renewing Friends’ Testimony on Economics
February 7, 2011 § 2 Comments
One of the reasons I’ve been writing on Quakers and capitalism is that I hope to invite Friends to consider more deeply our testimony on economics (and I don’t mean our testimony on money, but on the structure and institutions and worldview of our economic system) with a fuller appreciation of our economic history as context. I believe we stand in some ways in the same relationship with capitalism as we do with penitentiaries: our ancestors played key roles in the emergence of capitalism (industrial capitalism, anyway) and its early evolution, just as we did with the penitentiary. And just as the penitentiary was, in its inception, an advance in human welfare, a positive solution to a problem, and now has become part of the problem, just so industrial capitalism brought tremendous improvements to humankind, only to become in some ways a new source of suffering and oppression. In both cases, our historical role lays upon us some kind of obligation to reform the system and minister to the victims of our legacy.
Where to start? We have four paths to walk, I think. They are somewhat independent of each other and each deserves careful consideration. In my initial thinking, anyway, these four paths to a renewed testimony on economics are:
- Starting with divine inspiration. The first impulse, of course, is to turn to our Teacher, from whom we have learned to expect continuing revelation. Spiritual renewal comes from G*d (using G*d as a placeholder for the Mystery Reality behind/within our personal and corporate religious experience, whatever that experience is). So, in addition to study, thought and discussion, we need to pray and worship and support those who are called to ministries of witness in this area.
- Starting with secular progressive thinking on political economics. The vitality of our economic testimony depends on being Spirit-led. Its effectiveness depends, to a great degree, on knowing the science of economics and the work of its progressive thinkers and critics. There’s lots of material here, and therefore lots to learn and lots of work to do.
- Starting from our present testimonies. We can work our way ‘laterally’ across our testimonial life from the other testimonies. This is a common and natural tack. I’ve done this myself, turning the light of the testimonies on peace, integrity, simplicity and equality on economics. This yields great fruit and I will return to this approach in some future posts.
- Starting from our foundational traditions, including, especially, the Bible. I think a lot of ‘liberal,’ ‘post-Christian,’ ‘post-traditional’ Friends overlook the Bible, partly because they just don’t know it and partly because, in some folks’ hands, they have experienced the Bible as a weapon of regressive thinking. This extends to the sphere of economics no less than other areas social and political life. In fact, I devote a lengthy section of Quakers and Capitalism to the often, though not exclusively, negative influence of evangelical thinking on progressive political economics. Nevertheless, our Christian Friends are in a position to lead the way here, because the gospel of Jesus is, at its core, a powerful progressive economic message.
I’ve been writing another book on the gospel of Jesus whose sections on his teachings on ‘economics’ have grown so much that it now looks like it needs to be its own book. The new book’s tentative title is Good News for the Poor: The Economics of Redemption in the Common-wealth of God. I’ve explored some of this material in my other blog, www.biblemonster.com, including a series on the Beatitudes, which, when you know enough about the ‘economic legislation’ in Torah, turn out to be midrashim on inheritance law and, specifically, on bankruptcy.
In fact, Christian scripture—the synoptic gospels, anyway (Matthew, Mark and Luke)—are totally saturated with economic testimony. Jesus was preoccupied with the poor and the people and social, political and religious institutions that oppressed the poor. (It’s worth noting that in Hebrew and Aramaic (Jesus’ native tongue), the word is the same for “the poor” and for “the oppressed”—ani, as in Bethany (beth ani, house of the poor/oppressed), the little town not far from Qumran where Martha, Mary, Lazarus and Simon the Leper lived.)
Jesus healed the poor and I believe that several of these healings included a social welfare dimension in the healing itself—that we too narrowly define these ‘miracles’ as medical cures of disease, and miss the innovations and reforms in community life that serve as context for his healings. Several of his other miracles also have an economic dimension. Several parables deal directly with poverty. Many of our favorite sayings of Jesus are essentially teachings about economics or have economic elements, including not just the Beatitudes, but also much of the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, and the two love commandments. The Lord’s Prayer has economics at its core. But more importantly, Jesus defined his ministry, his role as the Christ, the Messiah, in economic terms. Economic justice was the very foundation of Jesus’ ministry.
These are far-reaching claims, I know, and to some, all the more startling because these teachings often are virtually invisible to the ‘untrained eye.’ We know so many of these passages so well that it’s hard to believe such a different and radical meaning could be hiding in there. So it takes a while to make the case. I hope you’ll bear with me.
Nevertheless, I believe that Jesus’ teachings on ‘economics’ are comprehensive, far-reaching, radically progressive and totally relevant to our situation today, notwithstanding their original context in an agrarian economy very different from our own. The gospel is a great place to start when reconsidering out testimony on economics. I think I’m going to pursue this mostly in BibleMonster because that blog is dedicated to the Bible, but it will take time. For one thing, I have another theme I want to take up there, as well—what I call “spiritual ecology”: a look at how Jesus used the landscape of Palestine in his own spiritual practice (where he went in Palestine to do what and why); and also a look at the role that ecology and technology have played in the emergence and evolution of the Western religious tradition more broadly.
In the meantime, I want to lay out in BibleMonster the “economics of redemption” as I see them and bring these principles into Through the Flaming Sword as planks in a platform for a more fully developed Quaker testimony on economics. More to come . . .
Through the Flaming Sword 