The all-engulfing righteousness of God should be the only real justice we Christians are interested in. Evangelical churches ought to manifest a justice among ourselves that displays the kind of righteousness that can only be God’s. This has never been more important as society fragments into its multiple justices and communities. But this has also rarely been more difficult as late capitalism extends its dominion over all manifestations of North American life. Capitalism intrudes upon every living space. North American society imposes enormous capitalist pressures on its inhabitants that impede this kind of community.
THE GREAT GIVEAWAY:Reclaiming the Missionof the Church by David E. Fitch, Baker, 263 pp.; $14.99 |
So our congregations must work incessantly, paying off larger credit card bills and mortgages on bigger homes. Capitalist competitiveness and consumerism as well as liberal individualism shape us into being wealth accumulators, consumers, and parents who must take every possible produced advantage for our child’s growth and development. There is little time for our people to be the body, and so the local church often is reduced to being the distributor of religious goods and services. When we do come together, we come shaped as we are out of capitalism as individuals protecting our interests. We do not come determined first by our citizenship in Christ.
As a result, instead of being communities of God’s redeemed economics, many evangelical churches take on the communal characteristics of capitalism in strange ways. In the way evangelical churches organize, we curiously choose elders who are more successful as businessmen and accumulators of wealth than they are capable of giving wisdom and Christ-centered shepherding to the local congregation. We project budgets based upon how many people are actually “giving units” in the church. Our people walk and look like capitalists.
When anyone is in need or going through rough economic times, we do not talk about it because we are ashamed. It is a shame to be poor or unsuccessful in capitalism. We do not look upon each other with “unlimited liability” one toward another.” We surprisingly get our identities more from our jobs than our life in a Christian community pursuing God’s kingdom on earth. And we treat our money as our own. We live in fear that to give up our possessions will leave us alone and destitute when our time of need comes. The last thing our people will talk about in church is how much money we make or our investments at the bank. Our imbedded individualism hurts us as we hoard our money, keep private our personal finances, and die a slow death of the soul as we never learn how to truly live, rejoicing with those who rejoice, weeping with those who weep (Rom. 12:15). All of this makes practicing the justice of Christ in the local church more difficult.
Evangelical churches therefore face a significant challenge in being the church without withdrawing in toto from capitalism. How can we be a community of Christ in which the righteousness and justice of God are worked out among us without being determined by forces of democracy and capitalism? How do we eat, live, and have jobs in capitalism and yet not become driven by the emotions and desires of “consumeritis,” career success, and the protection of our financial security? How do we see justice as more than leveling the economic playing field or providing the basics necessary to give someone an opportunity to be successful in democratic capitalistic society?
Community in capitalism is so difficult because consumerism is always making us ask, Are we meeting your needs? But we do not need another pseudo community that gathers to support its members in each other’s striving for self fulfillment and career advancement. For we will again blend in to the all pervasive forces that make justice about getting more of what I want out of capitalism and democracy. Instead, God calls us in Christ to a righteousness of another kind. How do we live as community in but not of capitalism (John 17:14 18)? How do we practice the redeemed economics born out of his righteousness? How do we practice justice as righteousness as a people in but not of capitalism?
The answer to this question for many has been to withdraw from capitalism entirely and become an intentional community. Intentional community, with no private ownership of property, is certainly an option. Yet is there another way we can still live in capitalism but not be of it? Can we live together in a manner in which we retain private ownership yet view that ownership so differently that it actually binds us together as members of a body as opposed to separating us by the fears of securing our own interests?
Ron Sider has expounded how private property was not so much the issue in the New Testament church. Rather the issue in the New Testament church was how each member was to see that all his or her property and money was a gift from God to be held in such a way that there was an unlimited call on that property to meet the needs and mission of the community. The determining factor on wealth was the koinonia in Christ, the common lordship of Christ over all things (including wealth) for the common living out of his righteousness.
Roman Catholic traditions have also not excluded the right to own property but at the same time placed limits upon that ownership. According to some Roman traditions, to hold on to capital surplus in the presence of another’s need was a violent act. In some canon law, to steal from another’s surplus in time of mortal need was not a sin. Property was always held for the common good. According to Sider, an expression of that koinonia was financial responsibility one toward another as evident in Paul’s agreements with the Jerusalem church and the sharing of the Gentile church in their need (Gal. 2:9 10).
As John Yoder has advocated and Ron Sider affirmed, the early church lived under the shadow of the Jubilee tradition that practiced the holding of property only for a limited period as a steward or manager of that property for the benefit of God and his people. At the end of every fifty years the ownership of land and property would be returned and equalized among the people (Lev. 25:10 24). The property was not to be owned in perpetuity; it was to be owned as a steward would manage the property for his master. God and God alone owned the Land (Lev. 25:23). In many respects, the community described in Acts chapters 2 and 4 is a reflection of these principles. It was this attitude toward private ownership that governed the church.
It is disputable whether or not the Year of Jubilee was literally carried out either in the nation of Israel or for that matter in the early church. But the principle provides a backdrop for how we are to live as the eschatological people of God called into living out his righteousness and justice one with another in but not o f capitalism. Intentional community of one purse is not the only option to make this happen. As many such communities have discovered, becoming a community of one purse does not totally insulate the community from the influences and pervasive corrupting forces of capitalism.
What does, however, make possible the living together in but not of capitalism is the fundamental disposition wherewith we hold our privately held property together, in “unlimited liability” one toward another and to God, recognizing that the property is not ours in the first place, just placed into our stewardship for a short time for the blessing of God’s people. It is a disposition toward ownership that rejects capitalism’s contention that it is something I have done that merits the ownership of my property and wealth.” Instead, I hold property in the service of the King.
Whether intentional community of a common purse or whether we come together maintaining separate bank accounts, I contend that the development of this crucial disposition of stewardship and practices to live in that disposition are what shall enable us as evangelicals to carry out justice as a community in but not of capitalism. Similar to the early church, which lived with slavery as an economic reality hardly capable of displacement, so too we might have to live with capitalism as an economic reality not soon to be displaced.
Nevertheless, as theologian Oliver O’Donovan has described, the early church carried the conviction that the church itself was a society without master or slave within it And so likewise, the evangelical church must carry the conviction that the church itself is a society where no one holds goods and resources in private ownership, but as gifts from God for his faithful stewardship one to another for the pursuit of justice and righteousness in our midst and then to the world. It might then be necessary for us evangelical church members to maintain private ownership and bank accounts in order to live in capitalism, but as his church we shall not live as if there are any owners among us, only stewards of God’s gifts for the benevolence of all under his lordship.
This kind of disposition toward wealth can only be formed inside the church community through the concrete practice of justice one situation at a time. Indeed, Christian justice begins with that woman who stands in the middle of the congregation and says, “I have cancer, I have no health insurance.” At this point we can neither argue about governmental health insurance policies nor write an easy check that will not hurt our bank accounts. Evangelicals may be prone to seeing this woman as derelict in her duty to work and be responsible for herself and his family. This is the justice of capitalism. But it cannot be this easy when the woman stands up and speaks amidst the congregation. This woman must be heard and talked with. We must discover why she has no health insurance. We must examine her own life and ours as to why we allowed this to happen in the first place to someone who has been in our midst for three years. We must pray for her medical care and see that her family has sufficient support to make it through. We must serve this woman in such a way that not only is she taken care of medically but the overall status of this woman’s relationship to God, her secular community, and her church community is restored.
We must also ensure that the church somehow does not contribute to her dereliction in not having health insurance if there was in fact dereliction. We must in fact deal with everything that has to do with this woman being in righteous relationship to us her community and to God and to the world. The regular practice of such restoration forms the disposition of justice in the community.
Only after we have walked through this process can we see similar situations in the world and make comparable discernments as to what it means to restore such situations to righteousness in God outside the church. Only after we have been formed into the disposition of Christ’s justice in community do we have the disposition necessary to carry out his justice in the world. Only after we have walked through this process with someone can we go to the government and propose broad solutions that can model the community of Christ in caring for the one left destitute without health insurance.
When a woman comes forward in the middle of the congregation, we are tempted to give her money so that she will go away, or we are tempted to slough off her request as someone whose irresponsibility should not be rewarded. But because she is in the middle of us, we cannot treat this woman as the detached stranger who panhandles for change in the street. She is in the congregation of Christ and we must come into relationship with her. This practice of engaging her in our midst forges the new justice that is ours in Jesus Christ. It is the New Order coming into being in our midst. And it forms the basis for the justice of Christ to be worked out in the world.
Adapted from The Great Giveaway by David Fitch (Baker Books). Used with permission of Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group.
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Related Elsewhere:
The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, Consumer Capitalism, and Other Modern Maladies is available from Christianbook.com and other book retailers.
Also posted today is Jonathan R. Wilson’s review of Fitch’s book.
More information is available from Baker Books and the book website.
David Fitch blogs on the themes he dealt with in The Great Giveaway.
Fitch is pastor of Life on the Vine.
An extended discussion of the book at Scott McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog starts here.