God’s Economy
Been light posting – holidays stuff, traveling, etc. I’m in BFE right now and found an internet at a McDonald’s, enjoying a tasty double Quarter Pounder with Cheese and have to share the following.
I was impressed, moved by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent op-ed in London’s Daily Telegraph. It was sort of misunderstood by some of the press coverage I read about it. Perhaps misunderstood isn’t the right word, it was mis-represented. The point of his message was that unswerving loyalty to a system – whether it be economic, political, social – a system that pits one group of people against another – is bound to have bad, perhaps disastrous consequences.
In part, Dr. Rowan Williams wrote:
What Barth saw beginning to take its grip on Germany in 1931 was a system of “principle” that worked quite consistently once you accepted that quite a lot of people that you might have thought mattered as human beings actually didn’t. As the nightmare decade unfolded, the implications of this became clearer and clearer. And what he was warning against was the temptation of unconditional loyalty to a system, a programme, a “cause” which was essentially about “me and people like me”. It’s about the danger of my agenda, our needs, the programme of this particular group, its safety and prosperity.
And Christmas is supremely the story of a God who is not interested in telling us about principles. First comes the action – God beginning to live a human life. Then comes the appeal: do you love and trust what you see in this human life, the life of Jesus? Then the implication: everyone is capable of saying yes to this appeal, so no one is dispensable. You don’t and can’t know where the boundary will lie between people who belong and people who don’t belong.
And what did we see in the human life of Jesus? From what is written in the Gospels, we know he lived, preached and taught among the least of us. His philosophy, his teaching, his actions were inclusionary. They were about reaching out to the marginal and drawing them in.
The media focused on the fact that Dr. Williams, in his op-ed, chose to make his points – both theological and political on the experience of Karl Barth and the nightmare of Nazism. Distilled down, for me at any rate, his point is that we are in the midst of dealing with the unintended harsh, hurtful consequences of a system – of principles. That being the capitalist, un-regulated free market. I don’t believe Williams was suggesting that jack-booted thugs will take over any time soon, but I do believe that he was saying our “going all in” with the current economic system and ignoring the marginalized, the least among us will eventually damage us all more than it has already.
A Christmas Eve service I attended brought it all home: God’s Economy. Pastor Al at a Lutheran Church in Bexley or Whitehall pointed out how bad the economy is. He reminded us, on Christmas Eve, that there was another economy that didn’t apply downward pressure on the poor, the hungry, the generally needy. God’s Economy is about the least among us first.
A little late for a Christmas message, I know, but just wanted to throw some of this out there. Basic Christian theology, from two different perspectives, both wrapped in intellect and argument yet simple at the core.
Text: Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury | Christmas Message | from The Daily Telegraph
Editors Note: First published in the Daily Telegraph (U.K.) December 21, 2008
Unconditional Loyalty to a System Not Worth the Human Cost
Forty years ago this month, one of the greatest religious thinkers of the 20th century died. In his long career in Switzerland and Germany, he had published millions of words, played a crucial role in inter-church discussions across Europe, denounced nuclear weaponry – and, before the war, done most of the work in drafting for the German churches a statement of open defiance against the Third Reich. Some of his most powerful lectures were delivered in the bombed-out ruins of the theological department in Bonn when the war had ended and he was able to return to Germany after being driven out by Hitler.
