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
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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?
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
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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.
Contraception and abortion October 22, 2009
Posted by Damian in Living Christianity, Sex, Sexuality and Marriage.Tags: abortion, children, contraception, gratification, population, sex, the birds and the bees
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Bryan Cross writes about self-gratification, contraception and abortion, noting that until the 1930s, Protestants as well as Catholics believed that contraception was against God’s will:
But when self-gratification becomes the conceived end of sexuality, then anyone or anything obstructing the way to that self-gratification is conceived as an impediment to the fulfillment of one’s sexuality. And Pope Paul VI was right. When an unborn child frustrates that self-gratification, the child must be destroyed [warning, obscene language at the link]. In this way, contraception is intrinsically linked to the violence of abortion. [...]
But let’s consider some uncomfortable questions. What if there is an intrinsic connection between the popular acceptance of contraceptives, and the legalization of abortion? And what if there is an intrinsic connection between the acceptance of contraception among Christians, and the popular acceptance of contraception? If so, then there is an intrinsic connection between the acceptance of contraception among Christians, and the legalization of abortion. In that case there is a deep contradiction between picketing in front of an abortion clinic, and using contraceptives or being in a Christian denomination that condemns abortion but condones the use of contraceptives.
Given this intrinsic causal relation between contraceptives and abortion, if Catholics and Protestants seek to stand united in opposition to abortion, we must stand united in opposition to the use of contraceptives and the contraceptive mentality. As important and worthwhile as protesting outside of abortion clinics is (especially in saving the lives of children whose mothers are persuaded by our presence not to abort their child), we are there confronting the deadly symptoms of the moral disease, not its fundamental cause. To stop abortion we must teach society the “birds and the bees” in its true sense. We must show the intrinsic evil of contracepted sex by showing the personal and teleological nature of sex in its God-given beauty and fullness. But this teaching cannot be only in words; it must first be in deeds. If Christians wish to stop abortion, we must throw out our prophylactics, and get off the pill. Protestants and Catholics cannot effectively teach the “birds and the bees” to society until we ourselves know and practice the virtue of chastity, i.e. true sexual excellence.
I find this Catholic argument against contraception very compelling, to be honest. I do believe that contraception has a place – especially in a world where population seems to be expanding at such a rate that it will soon overcome our ability to support it. However, it seems to me convincing that the adoption of contraception promotes goal of self-gratification as the goal of sex, and slowly shifted the meaning of sex in the popular consciousness from producing children to gratification. This culminates in the children produced in sex being unwanted (as if they weren’t an intrinsic part of the process).
I think Bryan makes a very good and important point, though, about “the birds and the bees”. When we teach children, we tell them that sex is for making babies. We don’t tell them that it is for feeling good. Yet as we grow older, the lines blur, and the message, especially in the popular media, is that sex is for pleasure, and most often the babies made are accidental – and interrupt ‘real life’. Perhaps adults should remind themselves of the “the birds and the bees”?
However, I think it would be difficult – and perhaps morally questionable – for every Christian to throw our contraception in this day and age. What can we do aside from publicize sex’s primary objective as the creating children? I don’t really have any answers. But Bryan, thanks for the thought-provoking post.
Unity and Protestantism October 19, 2009
Posted by Damian in Living Christianity, Roman Catholicism.Tags: Anglican, bickering, catholicisms, christianity, church, disunity, Eastern Orthodoxy, Gamaliel, heresy, magisterium, orthodoxy, protestantism, Protestatnt, unity
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The other day I was in a conversation where I mentioned the fact that I was not a ‘proud Protestant’. Why? Because I feel the disunity in the church caused by Protestantism has done far greater damage to the church than any correction of doctrine could ever balance. So, when Peter Kirk wrote about this in his recent post, I tuned in:
It still seems to me that there are two logical positions here, the same ones Newman outlined. One is to follow the authority of tradition which leads to Rome, or perhaps to Eastern Orthodoxy. The other is to follow the authority of sola scriptura which leads, whether we like it or not, to the kind of free for all which Robbie Low caricatured. There is, it seems to me as it did to Newman, no logically tenable middle way by which, for example, we reject the authority of the church up to 1517, accept the right of a few Reformers to their private judgment, and then imply that suddenly in about 1611 or 1662 everything changed and we have to abandon sola scriptura and follow the authority of a new Protestant magisterium and inquisition.
The conversation I mentioned took part because I consider myself Anglican, go to an Anglican cathedral, spend my time with Anglicans, and yet haven’t signed up for it. I don’t think I’m trying to walk the middle way that Peter mentions; what I’m doing is sitting on the fence hoping (with probably foolishness – but I keep my eye on the news on Principium Unitatis) that the Catholic and Orthodox conjoin and I can be a part of a united church. But I often wonder, as Peter says, is this foolish? And then he says this:
It is of course very sad when these informal groupings start bickering in public, and they should be encouraged not to. Nevertheless the system is not disastrously bad. Of course some of them have come off the doctrinal rails. But this is where the Gamaliel principle comes in: in most cases congregations which have become seriously liberal gradually decline and die, even though Anglican system tries its hardest to keep these dying congregations alive. The congregations which grow and divide are almost always those which are faithful to the word of God.
To me, you see, it is more important that groupings of Christians do not bicker in public (as they do), than whether or not they have come off the doctrinal rails; especially in todays saturated media, where every statement made can be and is broadcast to every corner of the globe. In a world where disunity is very, very public, I feel that the priority is to present a united Christianity, not to be right in every aspect of doctrine.
Now, perhaps this is foolish: Definitions of ‘Christianity’ then become very important. I, after all, define ‘Christian’ as following the basic historical creeds. But I have friends who do not. And is it disunity to reject these friends? May be. There are plenty of issues with Christian unity. But I nevertheless feel that a unified church, with numerous schisms and heretics, is preferable to schisms without count, and no church to speak of. The church isn’t supposed to be ’survival of the most faithful’. It’s supposed to be all-in-one.
