Category Archives: Economics

Capitalist Ideology and the Kingdom

The problem with a capitalist ideology is not that it’s capitalist.  Rather, it’s that it’s ideology.  Capitalism isn’t perfect, but no system developed is, and we can argue about which one is better.  But ideology is a social system of signs that disguise the inherent problems of the system.  This is an inherent problem in our government in which the primary parties are pure ideological.  There’s no concern for the problems within each party’s propositions, because they have to sell them to the American public.  And the American public itself is equally, and probably more so, ideological than Congress.  The fault is not in our stars…

In Christianity too, we have too much kingdom ideology.  We must seek to distinguish kingdom ideology from Kingdom of God ideology and equally from the material practices of the Kingdom of God.  Ultimately, we must practice the Kingdom of God, immediately.  Not because it’s the correct ideology, but because such material practices embody Jesus.  And that the material practices belonged to Jesus ought to be enough to set us free from the hard and soft authoritarian ideologies of kingdoms.  Otherwise, what are we proclaiming?

A Lectionary Experience: Mark 5:21-43

First, on my old blog, I’ve dealt with this passage before:

The writer of Mark favors what are called sandwich stories, A-B-A’ constructions, where B as the central point in the story, says something crucial about A and A’.  Have a look:

A.  21 And when Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered about him, and he was beside the sea.  22 Then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name, and seeing him, he fell at his feet  23and implored him earnestly, saying, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live.”  24 And he went with him. And a great crowd followed him and thronged about him.

B. 25 And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years,  26 and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse.  27 She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment.  28 For she said, “If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.” 29 And immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.  30 And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?”  31 And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, ‘Who touched me?’”  32 And he looked around to see who had done it.  33 But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down before him and told him the whole truth.  34 And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

A’. 35 While he was still speaking, there came from the ruler’s house some who said, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?”  36 But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.”  37 And he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John the brother of James.  38 They came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and Jesus saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly.  39 And when he had entered, he said to them, “Why are you making a commotion and weeping? The child is not dead but sleeping.”  40 And they laughed at him. But he put them all outside and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him and went in where the child was.  41Taking her by the hand he said to her, “Talitha cumi,” which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise.”  42 And immediately the girl got up and began walking (for she was twelve years of age), and they were immediately overcome with amazement.  43 And he strictly charged them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

In the two stories above, an elite (ruler of the synagogue, male, house owner) comes to Jesus asking for him to heal his daughter and save her from imminent death.  But Jesus, on the way to the ruler’s house, pauses for a disenfranchised woman with an impure discharge who has no money.  He pauses, because this woman touched his garment to be made well.  And Jesus calls her, Daughter, not by mistake, but most likely in the presence of Jairus.  This girl too is a daughter.  Then Jesus continues and heals the daughter of Jairus.

In this story, Mark wonderfully juxtaposes the poor and the elite, and shows the priority of the Divine Dominion is for the poor and marginalized first, and then to the elites.  But not only that, but by calling her daughter, Jesus somehow connects the two daughters, perhaps calling Jairus, and other elites, to look upon this woman as a daughter as well.

Existentially, I imagine the experience of the Mark’s readers were concerned for their health and subsistence as this woman was.  Perhaps, the call then, is rather than simply be wrapped up in one’s own existential concerns, we may understand the universality of such concerns, and share the concerns of others, especially with regards to health and subsistence.

Story Saturday: A Lending Parable

Know where this one’s from?

There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his possessions. And he called him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Turn in the account of your management, for you can no longer be manager.’ And the manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do, since my master is taking the management away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do, so that when I am removed from management, people may receive me into their houses.’ So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He said, ‘A hundred measures of oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty.’ Then he said to another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He said, ‘A hundred measures of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and write eighty.’ The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.

The Crisis of Subsistence: A short note

A short reflection on last Sunday’s post, Sheep without a Shepherd:

While I said,

This is a story about Jesus teaching the hungry disciples to feed the hungry masses.

This too is an ontological claim.  I admit it.  Of course it is.

But the existential analysis, is trying to point to the lived, in-the-moment experience of the hearers of Mark.  We actually don’t need the Bible to show us that large numbers in the First Century struggled with subsistence.  But the fact that the Bible addresses it, in my opinion, means that it must be one of the concerns of the Church, prior to any theological claims.

Housewarming

It’s official, valuedexchanges.com has moved here.  It will shut down at the end of May.  I have moved a few posts over, one’s that I thought were genealogies of the thought that gave birth to this blog: rudimentarybible.com.  Of course the ‘rudi’ is a reference to Rudolf Bultmann.  I will continue the Bultmannia series here.  I also plan to critique and develop the use of Bultmann’s existential hermeneutics of the Bible.  The methods are from the academy, and the results are for the church.  Academia in service of the Church, a goal I believe Bultmann would have been proud of, so long as academic integrity and functions are not compromised by Church dogma.  Check out the ‘About’ page for more information.  For those who miss the economic articles of valuedexchanges.com, rest assured those are still included in existential analyses.

Cheers.

2,000 More Years of Critiquing Rome

Professor Byron states in a recent blog:

It has become quite popular over the last few decades for New Testament scholars to bash ancient Rome and suggest that when first century Christian writers use terms like gospel, Lord, savior, kingdom, etc, that these authors are deliberately critiquing Rome and its emperors. Some modern scholars have pushed this interpretation so far that the New Testament looks less like a theological book and more like a political manifesto. And perhaps that is part of the problem. Too often some of these interpretations of “Rome’s gospel” are clearly motivated by frustration with American hegemony. And while I think American policy does need to be critiqued and criticized, I am not sure that authors like Paul and others were doing same thing with Rome as some modern scholars suggest. To hear some New Testament scholars talk there was nothing good about ancient Rome and that the world would have been better off without it.

This got me thinking: Did everyone in the ancient world hate Rome? Which then reminded me of the scene from the Monty Python film Life of Brian in which the Jewish rebels are planning to kidnap Pilate’s wife because they hate the Romans. But of course, as the below clip makes clear, not everything about the Romans was all that bad.

(See the link to his blog for the Monty Python video)

In my view, Professor Byron is somewhat correct when he notes that such perspectives are motivated by “frustration with American hegemony.”  This stems from, what is in my view, the great anti-American Empire triumvirate from Boston: Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Richard Horsley.

However, this criticism is also based on a separate field of studies called Postcolonial studies, which analyzes texts from the colonized (see this introduction).  Particular studies have been done to look at colonies of the British Empire and see how they produced texts/art while being colonized.

Let’s be clear.  Every Empire does great things as the Monty Python skit suggests, but the question is always: “At what cost?”  Sure we like your aqueducts, your smooth roads, and your safe seas, but if the cost of these is human lives (Revelation 18.13), then is it really worth it?  But what Postcolonial criticism of literature has shown, is that even if the writers do not openly critique or show contempt for the Empire, there acts of writing still question the center and act at least in small forms of resistance.

Revelation critiques Rome with apocalyptic language.  The Gospels critiques the Roman way of life without naming the Empire.  And Paul has to jump through Imperial hoops to spread the Gospel and help the poor.  And why are there even so many poor that Paul has to help in the first place?  So certainly, every book in the New Testament doesn’t cry out, “Down with Rome!”  But the difficulties of Empire cannot be ignored when engaging the New Testament, or any of the Old Testament either (Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece…)

The problem I think Professor Byron has is that such criticism is all to prevalent these days in biblical studies. The first reason is that Postcolonial Criticism is a relatively recent development in biblical scholarship.  But the other reason is simply that for nearly 2,000 years, Roman Imperial oppression was almost totally ignored in biblical studies.  So in order to have a “little more balance,” we may need another 2,000 years of critiquing Rome.

What is the Gospel?

In a recent post by Rachel Held Evans, she poses the question, “What is the Gospel?” to the public, to her favorite bloggers and writers, and gives a nod to Scott McKnight.  I wrestled with this question before, and I thought I might share my questions and research.  In no way do I seek to answer this question clearly, for I am admittedly only a Bible scholar.  Yet, I feel I can enlighten at least part of an answer.  I will use parts of a paper I wrote a couple years ago.

As far as the Gospel goes, there is a double-tradition passage in Matthew and Luke that really got me to thinking.  When John the Baptizer was in prison, he sent some of his followers to Jesus to find out if he was “the one who is to come.”

Matthew 11:4-5  And Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see:  the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.

Luke 7:22  And he answered them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them.

The blind, the lame, the lepers, the deaf, and the dead all have their problems solved.  But what do the poor get?  Some good news?  You might expect the poor to get some money, free shelter, free food, etc.  But some preaching?  Come on, that just seems unfair.

Charles Spurgeon preached, “Almost every impostor who has come into the world has aimed principally at the rich, and the mighty, and the respectable; very few impostors have found it to be worth their while to make it prominent in their preaching that they preach to the poor.”1 It is because the good news is heralded to the poor and not the rich that the good news can be paralleled with the other miracles in Luke 7.22.  The allusion is to Isaiah 61.1.  If we read the Greek of the Septuagint and the New Testament, we can see a turn in the use of the verb euvaggeli,zw (to preach the gospel/good news) at Isaiah 61.

Before, whenever euvaggeli,zw is used, there is always a herald bearing the good news and an audience of it. In nearly all instances of its usage, honor is attributed to its audience outside of Second and Third Isaiah. . Yet, in most of its uses, euvaggeli,zw gives honor either to a ruler or to the people of a victorious military conquest by a herald.  Also, honor is attributed to a king who has a son, when the herald brings the good news.  Examples include: 2Sam. 4.10; 18.19-20, 26, 31; 1Kings 1.42; 1Chron. 10.9.

So in Isaiah 61, and in the two Gospel passages, the meaning is put on its head—the poor are esteemed as though they are kings.  The poor do not simply lack material things, but they are outcast and humiliated in society.  The heralding of good news, whatever the content of the message, says to the poor, “You are no longer an outcast, you have dignity and worth.”

While one may still wonder, and I do, why don’t they receive food or shelter or other things that they need, it is something curious about the Gospel that the poor’s place in society is raised, perhaps above the level of kings and rulers.  What is the Gospel?  I cannot answer so easily.  But what the Gospel does: at the very least, it raises the societal importance of the poor and the marginalized in society.  And while we may want to know what the Gospel does for ourselves, the challenge of these passages is that we may be heralds of the good news by recognizing the importance of the poor and the marginalized before God and in society.

 

1 “Preaching for the Poor,” http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0114.htm.