The economics of Jesus November 8, 2009
Posted by Damian in Living Christianity.Tags: cathedral, consumer, consumption, currency, economics, health, investors, Jesus, Luke, macroeconomics, middle ages, you cannot serve God and Wealth
add a comment
I came across this very old post on Jesus and macroeconomics:
No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. Luke 16: 13
Jesus probably didn’t know much about macroeconomics, even though he was God. But he really meant all those things he said about selling everything we have and giving to the poor and then following him.
The economics of Jesus is very simple. Live sparingly. Don’t waste anything. Take only what you need and leave the rest for others. If possible, replenish what you take. Leave things no worse than you found them. And most important, don’t become preoccupied with things, because they are not what your life is about.
The world as we know it could not run on the economics of Jesus. The consumption of goods, which drives the whole thing, would slow to a trickle. Most workers would be let go. The wealth of investors would disappear. The markets would crash. Instead of only half the world’s people being desperately poor, we would all be foraging for food. It almost makes you glad that no one takes Jesus seriously.
But if we want to be followers of Jesus, we really do need to take him seriously, even if no one else does. He meant everything he said about being poor in the things of this world in order to be rich in grace. And he ought to know; he is God. He never would have won a prize in economics for his teaching, but what he said is the gospel truth.
Of course, I think it’s more likely that God knows all about macroeconomics, but still requires us to reject the accumulation of wealth. Why would he do that? Would the world as we know it collapse if run on the economics of Jesus. Perhaps not. From an interview with Douglass Rushkoff:
The Vatican and central Rome did NOT build the cathedrals. The funds came from local currency, which was very different than money as we use it now. It was based on grain, which lost value over time. The grain would slowly rot or get eaten by rats or cost money to store, so the money needed to be spent as quickly as possible before it became devalued. And when people spend and spend and spend a lot of money, you end up with an economy that grows very quickly.
Now unlike a capitalist economy where money is hoarded, with local currency, money is moving. The same dollar can end up being the salary for three people rather than just one. There was so much money circulating that they had to figure out what to do with it, how to reinvest it. Saving money was not an option, you couldn’t just stick it in the bank and have it grow because it would not grow there, it would shrink. So they paid the workers really well and they shortened the work week to four and in some cases three days per week. And they invested in the future by way of infrastructure — they started to build cathedrals. They couldn’t build them all at once, but they took the long view — with three generations of investment they could build an entire cathedral, and their great-grandchildren could live in a rich town! That’s how the great cathedrals were built, like Chartres. Some historians actually term the late Middle Ages “The Age of Cathedrals.”
They were the best-fed people in the history of Europe; women in England were taller than they are today, and men were taller than they have been at any point in time until the 1970s or 80s (with the recent growth spurt largely the result of hormones in the food supply). Life expectancy of course was still lower; they lacked modern medicine, but people were actually healthier and stronger and better back then, in ways that we don’t admit.
It seems that, living off a local, subsistence income, people were healthier and more productive of incredibly expensive architecture and artwork than they are today, and that is without today’s technologies. Maybe God has a point?
Superstition in Judaism and Christianity November 5, 2009
Posted by Damian in Judaism and Christianity.Tags: historical fact, human experience, luck, magic, occult, occultism, paranormal, religion, resurrection, scientific knowledge, sefer hasdim, supernatural, superstition
add a comment
Claude Mariottini links to an interesting article on occult Judaism, but I’m not sure about his conclusion:
…belief in the supernatural has existed throughout human history and is present in almost every culture of the world. The article also demonstrates that religious people are not immune from believing in the supernatural. Religious people believe in the supernatural because they believe in an order of existence that is beyond human understanding and that goes beyond the visible universe.
Superstition, however, is a distortion of true religious faith because it is a system of beliefs that is not based on historical facts, on human experience, or scientific knowledge. Superstitious claims are associated with the paranormal, occult practices, belief in magic and luck, and the fear that the lives of individuals can be affected by these elements.
Now, to me it seems that religion is, above anything else, a belief in the supernatural. Even the most simple form of Christianity believes in a supernatural resurrection, or in a supernatural God supernaturally made into flesh. I’m not sure how Christian belief- or any other religious belief – has any more grounding in historical fact, human experience, or scientific knowledge than someone who wears an amulet with the name of an angel on it to protect themselves from evil spirits. And to be honest, I think that most religious belief is based as much on fear – at the least a fear of being without communion with God, and at the worst a fear of God himself – as any superstition.
And I think Dr Mariottini might have missed the point of the article in interpreting it this way (or perhaps I misunderstood him?), as it ends like this:
And despite how far into the modern world Jews have moved, they continue to hear the echo of Sefer Hasdim, the famous medieval text, which advised, “One should not believe in superstitions, but it is best to be heedful of them.”
Which to me suggests that, whilst we should not believe in superstitions, we should not disregard them. Now, I’m not a superstitious person. But I hesitate in making the statements that Dr Mariottini makes in disregarding superstition as a distortion of true religious faith. I think that superstition often makes up a vibrant and rich part of religious faith, a part which I don’t think it intrinsic to Christianity – or to any religion – but that is certainly not a part that needs to be swiped at or treated as inferior.
Inerrancy leads to distorting God’s character November 1, 2009
Posted by Damian in Biblical Exegesis and Interpretation.Tags: dangerous, deuternomy, distortion, Exodus, inerrancy, inerrant, inerrantist, Leviticus, numbers
9 comments
Steve drew my attention to Cliff’s post on literal interpretation:
Inerrancy leads to distortions of the character of God. Sometimes, horrendous distortions. A few examples should suffice: In an inerrant Bible, God becomes one who endorses the practice of selling one’s daughters as sex-slaves (Exodus 21:7-11). The God of the Inerrantist commands that children who sass or stubbornly disobey their parents are to be killed for their transgressions (Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21). If God were speaking through Moses in the pages of Numbers 31:9-18, then God followed the pattern of many military conquerors, rewarding soldiers with virgins for their sexual indulgence (or please, Inerrantist, explain what else is going on in these verses!). The God of the Inerrantist was, on occasion, confused about biology, as when he identified rabbits as ruminants in Deuteronomy 14:7. Furthermore, an Inerrantist must view God as sometimes raging out-of-control, one who had to be talked out of venting his rage upon the Israelite nation by the cooler-headed Moses (Exodus 32:7-14). This list could be expanded. We haven’t even ventured beyond the first five books! But my point should be clear by now. Inerrancy is dangerous to a healthy view of God and his character. It leads to theological confusion and distortion.
There’s more good stuff, but I think this is the crux, and a well-said one at that. Thanks, Cliff.
Hospitality between theologies October 29, 2009
Posted by Damian in Living Christianity, Psychology and Religion.Tags: christianity, cleanliness, disgust, dumbfounding, hospitality, morality, psychology, sinners, theology, unclean
2 comments
Richard Beck recently wrote a long series on Purity and Defilement over on his blog, Experimental Theology. One post – one a while ago, actually – spoke about the reason why often much theological argument is doomed to failure:
Disgust is very different from anger…You can teach a young child to feel disgust at a substance–by strong parental reactions and other forms of psychological influence. Imagine, however, trying to convince someone who is not disgusted by a bat that bats are in fact disgusting. There are no publicly articulable reasons to be given that would make the dialogue a real piece of persuasion. All you could do would be to depict at some length the alleged properties of bats, trying to bring out some connection, some echo with what the interlocutor already finds disgusting: the wet greedy mouth, the rodentlike body. But if the person didn’t find those things disgusting, that’s that.
A similar analysis holds in the church. If the felt experiences of the divine (and, by definition, the profane) differs within the church then these groups will be at an impasse, literally dumbfounded by their inability to find common ground. One group finds the word “crap” intensely offensive. Others don’t. And, as Nussbaum notes, that’s that.
What I’m saying, in a strong form, is that if our experience of the divine is regulated by disgust psychology then our conversations about God, sin and holiness are being torpedoed at some deep level. A dumbfounding is occurring. Consequently, conversations about God are inherently difficult because the logic of the divine is being regulated by emotion rather than logic. I think people in the churches have always know this. I’m just trying to illuminate the mechanics or, rather, identifying the monkeywrench that keeps jamming up the gears.
So, we have difficulty having conversations about God, because we find the implications of each others’ theologies disgusting. And that’s that. It won’t change. It’s a basic, psychological reaction. So I’m dumbfounded by how you can believe what you believes. And you’re dumbfounded that I’m not moved by your arguments. But the reason is that we don’t believe because of our arguments: We believe what we believe based on our disgust psychology, and justify it with our arguments.
But that’s not the purpose of Beck’s series: His point is that Christianity’s goal is to overcome our disgust psychology. It’s about mixing with sinners, lepers, and tax collectors.
So the implication is that part of our responsibility as Christians is to overcome the barriers within theologies; barriers not brought on by disagreements of argument (although it seems that way), but rather brought on my basic differences in the perception of cleanliness. We are to show hospitality to those who disagree with us theologically, just as we are to show hospitality to strangers and sinners and the unclean. And hospitality, not just in the sense of welcoming into our homes, but in the sense of accepting who they are and that they seem unclean to us, and not enforcing change.
I’ve never had a host I’d considered hospitable, end the night by forcing me to change my mind.
Sin and evolution October 23, 2009
Posted by Damian in Biblical Exegesis and Interpretation, Evolution and Creation.Tags: Adam, blame god, christ, creates good and evil, darknessa nd light, dual character, evolution, Genesis, good and evil, ligt of Christ, love, mimetic theory, monotheism, old testament, Original Sin, overcome, Paul, Rene Girard, scripture, sin, the fall, transcendence, wrathful god
3 comments
The clayboy, Doug Chaplin, recently wrote a thought-provoking post on original sin and evolution. He entitled it ‘No Adam, No Fall’, because it struggled with the Pauline concept that that Adam’s failure was a decisive moment in history. I’ll be quoting exhaustively, because I loved some of what Doug said.
I note Paul’s method. He re-reads the earlier story in the light of Christ. He does this with most things. I wonder what ways are open to us if we take that method seriously and look at ways of re-reading the whole narrative in the light of Christ, an even more thorough-going move from solution to plight, in the knowledge of creation and evolution that we have subsequently acquired.
I think this is an important thing to realize; Paul’s interpretation of Adam in the light of Christ is something we should attempt to imitate in our own interpretation of the Old Testament. Paul writes many letters, all teaching his followers in the churches how to think theologically, and how to be like Christ. These two things are not entirely separate. But, I think because of the goals of these letters (education), if we disagree with how Paul re-reads the Old Testament, we are not negating God’s inspiration in his letters. Paul wouldn’t have minded if we disagreed with him about Adam, so long as we re-read the fall in the light of Christ. I think the rest of Doug’s provisional thesis is best read in this light.
Sin” (if I may be every bit as anthropomorphic and anachronistic as Richard Dawkins is) is not only in the world long before “Adam”, but is the mechanism whereby Adam’s species can emerge and flourish as the one who is able to name the animals (in increasingly sophisticated taxonomies) and tend to the garden of the earth’s ecosystem (or destroy it).
As regular readers know, I’m a thorough supporter of Rene Girard’s memetic theory as a theory of sin; and of Christ’s sacrifice as a miraculous overcoming of that sin, rather than a satiation of a wrathful God. And hence, I think Doug hits the nail on the head with this: Sin is, in fact, something intrinsic and important to not only our daily lives, but our ancestry, and it is what makes us what we are. We are both very good in the eyes of God (Genesis 1:31), and not (Genesis 2:18).
Creation is what God is about, creating order from chaos, drawing conscious forms of life able to love and praise out of the primordial soup, developing those who will come to find their true selves in the image of the one in whom God encounters his creation. The image of God, revealed in Jesus, is God’s intention for men and women, transcending the selfish gene to live in a self-giving love that mirrors and responds to the love of God.
But, most importantly, God drew us out to overcome this flaw that both made us thrive and (perhaps) disappointed him in us. Through Christ, we can transcend the sin that has made us thrive, we can live in a self-giving love mirror and respond to the love of God. A valuable concept, Doug, and one beautifully put.
Why do I say ‘perhaps’ when it comes to God’s disappointment in us?
…there are indeed those other traditions of the origins of evil in the world which go alongside and beyond the account of Adam, Eve and the serpent. [...] Some of them seem to lay the blame more clearly on God, who makes both darkness and light. I think we need to go back to a fuller exploration of those traditions, and see if they can help enrich our understanding.
I culled a little bit, because I wanted to draw attention to laying the blame more clearly on God. There is certainly testament in scripture to God’s control over both good and evil – and how could there not be, and he still be God? It is something we must live with, if we are to be truly monotheistic in our faith. However, to me this suggests that it is unlikely God was disappointed in us, because that sin that helped us thrive was likely something given to us to overcome. We were made in the image of God, and the eternal presence of sin might be a necessary balance to God’s difficult role as Lord over both good and evil. And yet, God’s to constantly transcend this dual character for good: So too, through Christ, we can transcend our sin, and respond to God’s love.
Thanks for provoking thought, Doug
