The Church’s Message for Troubled Times
A number of biblical and theological themes provide the moral principles to guide the church’s witness in these trying times.
1. Protecting the Human Rights of all safeguards the dignity with which God has created each. Grounded in the biblical affirmation that all humans are created by God and in God’s image, the church teaches that all humans have certain rights that are essential to living with dignity as children of God. In 1978 the Presbyterian Church, US, adopted a Declaration of Human Rights that included the right to basic needs such as work, food, clothing, and shelter, as well as the right and responsibility to participate in one’s community. Subsequent church policies have lifted up other needs as human rights, such as adequate health care and the right of older persons to adequate material resources.[xxii] Hope for a Global Future reaffirmed that such rights include “the satisfaction of basic biophysical needs, [and] physical security.”[xxiii] The fulfillment of these human rights by society is the first priority of a just economy, and should guide economic decisions regarding the production, distribution, and consumption of resources. The lack of such fulfillment where resources are adequate becomes evidence of injustice which the church denounces as “moral scandal.” Yet, as these are human rights, Christians in the United States must gage our use of the earth’s resources in light of the rights of all other humans to the resources that sustain their lives. We are all challenged by the church’s statement of this first principle in its Resolution on Just Globalization:
The satisfaction of basic needs is indispensable for human development. Sufficiency for all requires that poverty be eradicated and that the affluent live more frugally….[xxiv]
2. Living in Covenant Community presents us with moral guides for our use of private property. Who owns the land? The Bible recognizes the goodness of private ownership of property. In agricultural societies, owning land permitted people to work and sustain themselves in dignity, owning the products of their labor. The Jubilee traditions testify to the importance of this concept. Today, the economic basis of maintaining our lives with dignity may take many forms: land, stocks and bonds, money, jobs, social safety nets. Yet, all of these ultimately depend on “land” as the material basis of human life. The biblical witness is equally emphatic that the land, that is, all forms of property, belongs first and ultimately to God (Lev. 25:23), as do our very lives. As these two concepts merge, Christians see that our personal ownership of property, regardless of the form it takes, is relative and finite. We own it for a short while; and we own it subject always to God’s purposes. We own it mortgaged to a much larger household, the oikonomia of God who declared that “there will be no poor among you . . ., if only you will obey the voice of the LORD your God…” (Deut. 15:4 RSV).
Covenant is the biblical concept which points to this quality of community. Covenant is the name for human community defined by the individual’s commitment to the well-being of all within the community. Covenant is the context in which individuals flourish in community as one family. In the covenant community, the organization of society is based on our recognition that we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, and they are ours. We acknowledge that shalom, that peace that grows out of our just and loving relationships with one another and God, is rooted in our actual interconnectedness and interdependence. In covenant community the unjust suffering of any diminishes all. There is no place in covenant community for the secular celebration of possessive individualism. The singular pursuit of self interest, even in the economy, has no biblical warrant. Indeed, the Bible warns against the seductive nature of possessions and wealth, as well as the idolatry that results when we identify ourselves with them and endlessly strive to obtain them. With realism we recognize the power of financial incentives, but Jesus’ greatest commandments broadcast the greater incentives of love.
3. By Engaging with the Public Order we work to create a common good. As Christians in the Reformed tradition, we have been guided by John Calvin’s concept of a third use of God’s law: namely, that through the gift of God’s grace, we can strive to live more faithfully not only as individuals, but as community.[xxv] Seeing God at work in all of life, we see the public arena of laws and policies as instruments through which the good of all should be discerned, provided and defended. Good laws and policies guide believers and non-believers to live together in mutual regard for the good of all. It is because government works for the good of all that Calvin considered service in it the “highest vocation.”
For example, recognizing that an unfettered, competitive market system inevitably tends to consolidate wealth and power in the hands of fewer people, the Reformed tradition has emphasized the importance of the role of government to establish and maintain conditions that nurture human development and safeguard equality of opportunity: “A fundamental task of government is to organize and preserve the basic social support systems that enable individuals and their mediating institutions to thrive together cooperatively and fairly.”[xxvi] This typically takes the form of government support for those institutions that serve the common good, such as schools, infrastructure, public recreational facilities, product safety, defense, and even, as we have now seen, the rescue of private companies deemed “too big to fail.” It also takes the form of regulations that protect our health and safety, promote civil rights, safeguard us as homeowners or renters, workers, consumers and savers, and provide special care to us as children, the sick or disabled, and the elderly. In a large and complex society, government also responds to the needs of those for whom a supposedly rational and efficient economy does not work. Among the many who are not adequately supported by our current economic model are: low-wage workers (one in four workers earned poverty-level wages in 2007),[xxvii] the unemployed, the underemployed, the young, the elderly, the sick and the disabled.
In this economic crisis, these public interest functions of government have been revealed once more as essential to the good quality of our society. Richard A. Posner, long a leading figure in the conservative ‘Chicago School’ of economics, argues that “we need a more active and intelligent government to keep our model of a capitalist economic from running off the rails.”[xxviii] Deregulation has proven itself as harmful as over-regulation. The revolt against taxation has been as devastating to the common good, to schools, to roads and to our capacity for response to the basic needs of our citizens, as is the wasteful use of government revenues. In the Reformed tradition, government is seen as having a positive role to play in creating the social conditions that support and encourage us to live cooperatively for one another, as God has commanded and Jesus has modeled. It is through regulation and taxation that government carries out our covenant responsibilities to protect the social foundation that supports individual and family well-being. Realism, again, says that we bear each other’s burdens partly through taxation, given the time-proven limits of charity.
Let us be clear: historically, the United States has been economically and socially healthier when it has been more egalitarian and when broad, high quality public education increased productivity in every sphere. Thus the role of government is not simply about taxation and re-distribution, but includes planning and public investment to create infrastructure, public utilities and transportation grids, and to encourage research. To be an opportunity society, we need to be a stewardship society, one that measures not only aggregate financial numbers but also monitors the social impacts of unemployment and poverty. The disincentives of inequality lead some to resentment and discouragement, limited horizons and literal depression, the rise of addictions and the increasing break-up of families. It leads others to a hardening of hearts, disinterest in the common good, and a false sense of self-worth and entitlement. A “great recession” seems an appropriate time to review the effectiveness of public subsidies, public debt and arbitrary restrictions on governmental creativity. This may be a time to examine the ideological preference for subsidizing the private sector. From a pragmatic standpoint, for example, could direct public investment in “green jobs,” and sectors such as public health, student loans, and public transportation be more socially efficient in some cases, and leave fewer Americans behind?
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