Why Sabbath Economics?

   "We read the Gospel as if we had no money," laments Jesuit theologian John Haughey, "and we spend our money as if we know nothing of the Gospel." Indeed, the topic of economics is exceedingly difficult to talk about in most First World churches, more taboo than politics or even sex. Yet no aspect of our individual and corporate lives is more determinative of our welfare. And few subjects are more frequently addressed in our scriptures.

   The standard of economic and social justice is woven into the warp and weft of the Bible. Pull this strand and the whole fabric unravels. At the heart of this witness is the call to observe what I call "Sabbath economics." At its root, Sabbath observance is about gift and limits: the grace of receiving that which the Creator gives, and the responsibility not to take too much, nor to mistake the gift for a possession. The economic implications of this tradition as it is articulated in the Bible can be summarized in three axioms:

1. the world as created by God is abundant, with enough for everyone-provided that human communities restrain their appetites and live within limits;
   
   
2. disparities in wealth and power are not "natural" but the result of human sin, and must be mitigated within the community of faith through the regular practice of redistribution;
   
   
3. the prophetic message calls people to the practice of such redistribution, and is thus characterized as "good news" to the poor.
   

   The theology of Sabbath economics and its ethic of regular and systemic wealth and power redistribution-most clearly summed up in the Jubilee release of slaves, deconstruction of debt and return of foreclosed land-is neither utopian nor abstract. It arose out of the concrete Hebrew experience of slavery in Egypt, and so is both corrective and preventative. I believe it continues to offer communities of faith today a Way out of our historical and persistent slavery to the debt system, with its competing theology of meritocracy and its alienating and cruel practices of wealth and power concentration and social stratification.

   Sabbath economics is an unfamiliar notion to First World churches in large part because it has been marginalized by biblical interpreters, whose silence has helped to legitimate the very debt system that the Bible denounces. Skeptical of the Jubilee tradition as irrelevant, unrealistic or threatening, they have not found evidence for its practice in either Testament because they have not been looking for it. This is because, as theologian Wayne Meeks puts it in his excellent book, God the Economist (1989), "Our theological imaginations have long been captive to the market-driven orthodoxies of modern capitalism."

   There is a deficit of theological work with regard to political economy. God concepts have been criticized in relation to racism, sexism, the technological mastery of the environment, and ordinary people's loss of the democratic control of their lives. But not enough attention has been given to how God concepts in North Atlantic church and society relate to the deepest assumptions of the market society.

   Yet the preeminent challenge to the human family in our time is the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and power, and any theology that refuses to reckon with these realities is both cruel and irrelevant.

   Today the wealthiest 20% of the world's population receives almost 83% of the world's income, while the poorest 20% receive less than 2%! Collins and Veskel (2000), in their concise primer on economic disparity in the U.S. today, tell us that in 1965 the average U.S. worker made $7.52 per hour, while the person running the company made $330.38 per hour. Today, the average worker makes $7.39 per hour, the average CEO $1,566.68 per hour - 212 times more! This is "trickle up" economics: the transfer of wealth from the increasingly poor to the increasingly rich. And neo-liberal policies of "structural adjustment" are not only hardening this income polarization, but also deepening psychic and social alienation. Whether through plant closings, the demise of the local grocery store or the crisis of the family farm, we in the First World are now witnessing the epidemic of communal displacement that has already devastated local culture, institutions and environments in the Third and Fourth Worlds. We Christians must talk about economics, and talk about it in light of the gospel.

   The good news is that our churches, according to Cornel West,"... may be the last places left in our culture that can engage the public conversation with non-market values." Indeed, the "subversive memory" of Jubilee justice has kept erupting throughout church history. It animated early monks, medieval communitarians and radical Reformers. Even with the ascendancy of modern capitalism - with its fierce antipathy toward Sabbath economics - this vision has not been extinguished. We see it in tracts and tunes by the 18th century "Leveler" Thomas Spence in the struggle against the enclosures (i.e. privatization) of the Commons in early industrial England: And we hear it in the 19th century spirituals of African slaves sung in American fields: Fortunately today, at the turning of the millennia, the vision of "release from the bondage of debt" is again firing the imaginations of faith-based activists.

   Over the last five years efforts to rehabilitate the Jubilee tradition for our time have been growing among those committed to redressing this longstanding and scandalous suppression of "good news" for the poor. This renewal movement is producing new readings of both the Bible and the economy, which are helping to animate popular struggles that range from local living wage campaigns in support of low-income workers to the international Jubilee 2000 Campaign that is educating and organizing in support of debt-relief for impoverished Third World countries. There is a groundswell of alternative consciousness around economics that one can see in the many small-scale experiments here and around the world with more just and environmentally sustainable business practices, technologies, land uses, financial systems, trade patterns, consumption habits, and income distribution schemes. This historical moment, then, offers a unique opportunity for the church to renew its spirituality and its mission to the world.

   For the fact is, these are hard times for those trying to resist the triumphant march of a global capitalism that leaves in its wake ever-increasing disparities between rich and poor. It is a struggle to find an alternative language and practice to the manic claims and absolutist grip of market thinking. That means this is a good time for the church to rediscover the radically different vision of economic and social practice that lies right at the heart of her scriptures. The Bible recognizes that inequalities will inevitably arise in "fallen" society - a realism it shares with the worldview of modern capitalism. Unlike the social Darwinism of the latter, however, the biblical vision refuses to stipulate that injustice is therefore a permanent condition. Instead, God's people are instructed to dismantle, on a regular basis, the fundamental patterns and structures of stratified wealth and power, so that there is enough for everyone.

   May this ancient biblical vision indeed animate new possibilities for our history, as invoked in the prayer of the nineteenth century abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison: Ched Myers
Pentecost, 2001


Ched Myers,   "The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics,"   (Washington DC: Church of the Saviour, 2002)

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