Moses' Circulating Mode of Power in the Book of Exodus

Moses' Circulating Mode of Power in the Book of Exodus

Rev. Douglas Olds

18 October 2014, Revised 15 December 2014

"It's good to be between a ruined house of bondage and a holy promised land."  --Leonard Cohen

Exodus derives from a record of communicative acts that shape the nation of Israel.  The figure of Moses may have a kernel of historical existence, but his person has been shaped by the writing down and 500 years of redaction of oral traditions, so that the leadership acts of Moses have been shaped by the historical needs of a group of separate tribes to coalesce into a nation, while the nation itself has been influenced by the traditions of Moses’ delivering leadership involved in the narrative. As such, the portrayal of leadership in Exodus is dialectical: its mythic account shapes the history of the people who themselves exert influence on how the text and persons of Exodus evolved through time from an oral tradition into a fixed canonical text by the post-Babylonian exile period, 6th -2nd C BCE. Brevard Childs notes, “the literature formed the identity of the religious community which in turn shaped the literature.”[1]

Leadership modes exemplify what Stortz[2] describes as coercive, charismatic, and coactive powers, to which I add a fourth category , leadership power withdrawal. In the Book of Exodus the leader is Yahweh (LORD) calling forth an oppressed people.  The LORD makes use of a deliverer-leader, Moses. Note how Moses exercises leadership power.  At first, Moses is described as an Egyptian prince who feels the pangs of empathy for the oppressed Hebrew slaves.  As an Egyptian prince, he attempts to exercise hierarchical, coercive power over those slaves, attempting patriarchically to “deliver them” through violence. He murders a violent overseer. (Ex. 2.11). Then he intends to exert more hierarchical authority by settling a Hebrew dispute: 

Ex. 2.13 When he went out the next day, he saw two Hebrews fighting; and he said to the one who was in the wrong, “Why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?” 14 He answered, “Who made you a ruler and judge over us?

Moses’ attempted leadership is not recognized because he has no acknowledged kinship with the Hebrews (though according to the text he has become aware of his Hebrew birth and empathies born of kinship).

Soon Moses flees, the first of his leadership “withdrawals.”  This is an interesting pattern, as first a potential leader tries to exert hierarchical power (power over) the community based on “natural” or in-born authority.  Sooner or later, this kind of coercive power over fails, and the leader flees or withdraws into a wilderness (cf. Nixon’s periodic and strategic withdrawals after defeats).

It is helpful to note that Moses' soul of leadership represents a liminal or mestizo character. He has the psychological affinity for and attitude of Hebrew marginalization, but the training and raising of Egyptian royalty.  God lifts up the liminal or mixed soul for the leadership personality, rather than follows secular leadership paradigm that demonstrates that the leader decisively exemplifies the strength and values of the homogeneous group.  Moses does not represent decisiveness because he is liminally situated between his experience in the values and society of the Egyptian elite, while he empathizes with the injustices experienced by the Hebrews.  His leadership "soul" or psychological actualization demonstrate some cognitive dissonance that is overcome by his calling by God to lead from his compassionate sense, for the benefit of the oppressed. Henri Nouwen in The Wounded Healer asserts, "the great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there."

Patterns and Trajectory of Power:  engagement and retreat exemplified by Moses

I.                   “Power over” leadership

II.                  Power failure

III.                Strategic withdrawal of leader into wilderness (tsimtsum, see below)

IV.                Spiritual struggle and rebirth (Moses in Midian, Ex. Ch. 3)

V.                  Charismatic call (Ex. 4): Moses is enabled by “Power within.” Yet manifests cognitive dissonance in his soul because of his prior experiences and social relationship.\

VI.                 Power sharing

VII.                 Episodic  (tactical) leadership withdrawals

VIII.               Return with Intercessory power


“Power within” is charismatic power that submits to the true holder of “power over”, that is the LORD.  However, Moses protests that his charismatic power is limited.  Moses asks, perhaps from anxiety, for his “brother” Aaron to serve as mouthpiece. Leadership becomes shared between Moses and Aaron in the struggle with Pharaonic power.  Moses and Aaron’s shared leadership thus becomes a third kind of power, “power with” or coactive power (Stortz 1993) [2]. “Power with” is mutual, reciprocal, involves choices, and involves equality.  Aaron is likewise an etiological figure: he is an individualized mythic figure for the later Aaronid priests who served the Israelite temple.  Note how leadership is shared between Moses and Aaron (and later, the “sister” Miriam.).  The egalitarian, mutual and reciprocal relationship between Moses and Aaron becomes a kind of ideal for the nation-state of Israel that formally invested power with prophet and priest.  Moses is prophet, Aaron is priest.  Leadership power in Exodus is coactive between these two ideal roles in the dialectical formulation of Israel’s history. 

        Intertestamental traditions of the Jews interpreted Ex 2.2 as a statement about the the unusual attractiveness of the baby Moses (Kugel 1998, 527) [7], a fineness of physical form and carriage that carried into adulthood. This physical fineness complements charismatic power and leadership over those people who discerned that Moses was especially favored by God, and they thus responded to him as "intercessory leader" (cf. Barton 2008, ch. 9).  That is, the people were consoled and motivated that the charismatic leader as favored one of God would pray for them.  Moses demonstrates charismatic leadership that even negotiates with God--to change God's intentions toward the people (Ex. 32.14).   This scriptural demonstration of intercessory power may conflict with more (post)modern views of leadership whereby the leader risks and models vulnerability for followers/the people, which is coactive.  Moses' intercessory leadership power with God follows his charismatic endowment and calling.
       
   An Egyptian prince with the schema of privilege and power , Moses was not used to not getting his way.  Frustration may have been a defining characteristic of his soul’s schematic adaptation as he moved into his liminal state of withdrawal to Midian (and later withdrawal for 40 days and nights onto Mount Horeb).  This tendency to meet leadership frustration with withdrawal suggests that Moses promoted episodic leadership vacuums, and consequently chaos might intrude into the Complex Adaptive Systems in which he was involved. The whole of the desert wanderings seem to so testify to this chaotic outbreak in the Exodus people’s encampments.  Moses had the soul for leadership: attractiveness, privileged upbringing, and entitlement to command, and he had survived a liminal and wilderness danger to his being in his own personal flight from Egypt. Moses’s soul was experienced with both wilderness danger and with the uses of charisma (physical and spiritual) to lead a group back into the wilderness.

There is a fourth kind of leadership power in Exodus, the withdrawal or what 16th C Kabbalists termed in Hebrew, tsimtsum.  Moses withdraws first to Midian for reflection, reeducation, and new call, then in Ex. 19 up alone onto Mt. Sinai for 40 days. He withdraws from leadership of the community for charismatic renewal (and eventually for the community’s covenantal renewal). Note what happens to the Exodus community and even Aaron.  The community and the norm-keeping priests need the charismatic leader/prophet to cohere, and they break down in sin in his absence.

Withdrawal of the charismatic/creative leader represents what the Kabbalists discerned in the creative act of God by God’s withdrawal: creative leadership may be effected by withdrawal, so that the community may take on responsibility, maturity, and new roles in the leader’s absence:

Lurianic Kabbala [16th C] propounds a theory of the creation and subsequent degeneration of an equilibrium and a practical method of attempting to restore the original harmony/equilibrium, now radically changed and partially debased in the context of the original perfection of initial state as structured by a divine Center of Value (Scholem 1955/Jacobs 1995, 325).[3]

Borowitz  (1974, 692) notes, “God does not initiate the existence of other things by extending himself. There would be no place for them to be, no area of non-being or partial being in which they might exist. Hence to create, he must first withdraw into himself. God must, so to speak, make himself less than he is so that other things could come into being.”[4]

Creation comes out of this withdrawal (tzimtzum) as from chaos. The equilibrium moves from catastrophe when the divine sparks enter the void, filling the containers which are both autonomous  and new bearers of the sparks of the center of value.  Borowitz’s proposal is that charismatic leaders reduce their radiance and allow new leadership “containers” to take shape under the “example” or paradigm of the center of value exemplified in the charismatic leader.  Tzimtzum thus becomes a method of leadership withdrawal, a mimetic example, and emergence of new leadership forms and system equilibria.  It is consistent with Schneider and Somers (2006, 356) [5] description of CAS [Complex Adaptive Systems] leaders as “tags” and influencers of others outside of constant exertion of power.  Tzimtzum (withdrawal) by leaders allows space for social movements that honor the center of value [God] in novel ways unanticipated by the charismatic or hierarchical leader.  That leader demonstrates confidence in the center of value by allowing these social movements to take shape, carving out a space for the emergence of novelty and adaptation which otherwise would not occur in the presence of command and control compliance. The community may take on responsibility and new roles in the leader’s absence (of course, in Exodus, withdrawal by Moses to Mt. Horeb for 40 days and nights tolerates and stimulates community breakdown, but yet later in Exodus even that community breakdown serves God’s liberating, re-creative purpose).

This dialectical struggle of the now leaderless vessels to restore harmony after the self-willed withdrawal of the Center of Value/divinely-ordained charismatic leader necessitates the development of the changed attitude of maturity. This attitude is sung and played in the tragic narrative of certain Psalms. Often, but not always, this attitude may demonstrate Stoic, maladaptive, or narcissistic tendencies.  If we take this pattern seriously, the follower will struggle to attain a maturity that recognizes the former naïve solipsism and innocent contentment with the center of value as an equilibrium that cannot be recovered.  Rehabilitated growth and adaptation requires living dialectically with both nostalgia and resolve. Mature exercise of power reflects this joy of survival and meaning making even in the face of a tragic, lyrical and blues-filled narrative of irretrievable loss.



NOTES:

[1] The dialectical nature of the Moses’ narrative as it feeds back on national development is a position associated with Brevard Childs. Childs favors a sociological understanding of Moses’ role:

“Especially in such passages as Ex. 20:18–20 and Deut. 19:15ff., that which is being described is not simply a historical event, but rather an etiology for the establishment of something institutional and ongoing. Moses’ role as covenantal mediator in the Sinai tradition has a decided cultic stamp which seems to point to an office within an institution.” --Beegle, D. M. (1992). Moses (Person): Old Testament. In (D. N. Freedman, Ed.)The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, vol 4, p. 910. New York: Doubleday.

[2] Mary Ellen Stortz, Pastor Power. Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1993.

[3] Gershom G. Scholem, 'Isaac Luria and his School', in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (London, 1955), 244­86 reprinted in  Jacobs, Louis (ed.). The Jewish Religion : A Companion, Oxford : Oxford University Press. 1995, p. 325-6.

[4] Eugene B. Borowitz. “TZIMTZUM: A Mystic Model for Contemporary Leadership.” Religious Education 69, 1974, pp. 687-700.
[5] Schneider, M. and M. Somers. “Organizations as Complex Adaptive Systems: Implications of Complexity Theory for Leadership Research.” Leadership Quarterly 17, 2006, 351-365.
[6] Barton, Ruth Haley. Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry. Intervarsity Press, 2008, ch. 9.
[7] Kugel, James. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as it Was at the Start of the Common Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998.

Repenting Neoliberalism from the Call of the Accra Confession: A Ministry for Replacing Accumulation with Equality as God’s Will for Human Economies

Repenting Neoliberalism from the Call of the Accra Confession: A Ministry for Replacing Accumulation with Equality as God’s Will for Human Economies

Rev. Douglas Olds

October 16, 2014

The World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) convened in the late 1990s to evaluate the economic situation in Africa and the developing world from a faith and justice perspective. The result of this convention was 2004’s “Accra Confession” (AC).  As a member of WARC, the Presbyterian Church (USA) (PCUSA) has publicized the text of AC as a document for congregational study and reflection rather than accepting it as an addition to its formal Confessional, doctrinal heritage.  As such, AC is a work of contextual theology rather than an instrument that is intended as a universalistic presentation of the doctrine of Gospel.

[AC involves] the theological conviction that the economic and environmental injustices of today’s global economy require the Reformed family to respond as a matter of faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Accra Confession calls upon Reformed Christians around the world to engage injustices in the world as an integral part of their churches’ witness and mission.[1]

AC is both a claim to Confessional Status (status confessionis) and a cry of suffering and a call for assistance from Christians in the global south.  As a claim to confessional status, AC links the Gospel to fighting for economic justice.  The PCUSA has mostly rejected that linkage, preferring instead Confessional establishment for traditional Reformed, doctrinal concerns.  That rejection essentializes (dogmatizes) the Gospel as the salvation of souls and is part of an historical and conceptual tension between dogmatism and contextualization in Presbyterianism.  The consensus of the contemporary PCUSA seems to be that since the Gospel essentials are not put at risk by the injustices decried by AC, AC is better read as a cry of pain that should be studied empathetically rather than adopted as a Confession with the duties to mission implied thereto.  The question may be asked, does the AC preserve Reformed and Presbyterian concerns, helping it to articulate Christ relevantly (contextualization)?  Alternatively, as Karl Barth asked in the 1920s, does rather the AC serve the entire church as “watchman” over doctrinal integrity (universalism)?[2]  I suspect, with amendment, AC leads us toward both implications, which would spur mission to incorporate the economic suppositions of the Gospel which reveals the justice of God. Unless and until AC is adopted as a Confession by PCUSA, I read and present it as a cry of pain worthy of Christian compassion, charity, and voluntaristic mission.  Were it formally adopted as a Confession, it would imply Christian duty and repentance.

AC describes Global Southern pain as a crisis, beginning paragraph 8, “The policy of unlimited growth among industrialized countries and the drive for profit of transnational corporations…[continuing para. 9] is directly related to the development of neoliberal economic globalization, which is based on the following beliefs:

• unrestrained competition, consumerism and the unlimited economic growth and accumulation of

wealth are the best for the whole world;

• the ownership of private property has no social obligation;

• capital speculation, liberalization and deregulation of the market, privatization of public utilities and national resources, unrestricted access for foreign investments and imports, lower taxes and the unrestricted movement of capital will achieve wealth for all;

• social obligations, protection of the poor and the weak, trade unions, and relationships between people are subordinate to the processes of economic growth and capital accumulation.”

The first substantive section of the AC is “Reading the Signs of the Times.”  As such, AC contextualizes itself in a doctrine of Creation, starting off (para. 5) with “We have heard that creation continues to groan, in bondage, waiting for its liberation (Rom 8.22).”  Two important theological moves are made by this particular quotation of Scripture. First, it grounds its cry of pain in a doctrine of Creation and liberation, theologically linking liberationist impulses in God’s hearing God’s people’s cry in Egyptian bondage (Exodus)[3] with God the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the universalistic assertion of Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds.  From suffering, God calls out a people, creating anew a nation for mission.  The mission of the people of the Exodus was to be a light to the world from whence the Gospel for all people was delivered.  Doctrinally in the Reformed Church, this linkage of liberation with Creation is traditionally more controversial.  Traditional Reformed concerns proposed that reconciliation effected by the Gospel was particularist (limited Anselmian atonement)[4] so that relationships of natural justice derived from liberationist considerations were deemed especially by doctrinaire traditionalists as the realm and exercise of charity rather than duty.  More recently, the PCUSA Confession of 1967 (C67) has attributed a universalist focus to its doctrine of reconciliation:  “9.07 In Jesus Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself…Therefore, the church calls all people to be reconciled to God and to one another.”[5]  A universalist reading of the Gospel, such as contextualized in C67 9.07, makes reconciliation an obligation.  Obedience becomes duty in 9.03: “Obedience to Jesus Christ alone identifies the one universal church and supplies the continuity of its tradition. This obedience is the ground of the church’s duty and freedom to reform itself in life and doctrine as new occasions, in God's providence, may demand.”  We discern here a tension between obedience and freedom, universalism and context.  Where freedom is discerned, contextualization of suffering engenders a mission to charity.  Where obedience is demanded, duty to universally work for justice follows.

            Hence AC’s opening “Reading the Signs of the Times” concludes with the missionary application of Luke 16.13: “14. We see the dramatic convergence of the economic crisis with the integration of economic globalization and geopolitics backed by neoliberal ideology. This is a global system that defends and protects the interests of the powerful. It affects and captivates us all. Further, in biblical terms such a system of wealth accumulation at the expense of the poor is seen as unfaithful to God and responsible for preventable human suffering and is called Mammon. Jesus has told us that we cannot serve both God and Mammon (Lk 16.13).”[6]

            We must exegete this Lukan passage to unpack the tension between duty and charity of missionary response, obedience and freedom, and universalism and contextualization of the Gospel message at question:

Luke 16.13 Οὐδεὶς οἰκέτης δύναται δυσὶ κυρίοις δουλεύειν· ἢ γὰρ τὸν ἕνα μισήσει καὶ τὸν ἕτερον ἀγαπήσει, ἢ ἑνὸς ἀνθέξεται καὶ τοῦ ἑτέρου καταφρονήσει. οὐ δύνασθε θεῷ δουλεύειν καὶ μαμωνᾷ.[7]

We note the figurative and emphatic language. Jesus is addressing the οἰκέτης rather than some specific class, such as his disciples, and emphasizes Οὐδεὶς  by placing it primary in his speech act, so we should expect that he is speaking parabolically (exaggeratedly and symbolically). The verb δουλεύειν ends the first phrase, thus is emphatic in its syntax.  Δουλεύειν is the verb for a servant’s task.  It implies an association with a servant’s virtue, which is obedience.  There is a verb in Greek for discipling, μαθητεύειν, that might have been used by Jesus if freedom and initiative were intended.  This text implies obedience and thus duty.   This parable begs the question whether Jesus is speaking contextually or universally.  Emphasizing Οὐδεὶς by placing it primary in his speech act, Jesus clearly is universalizing, though parabolically, obedience for all who are symbolically characterized as οἰκέτης.  The meaning of this word conveys the concept of servant householder, the activities of which were the primary task of traditional economic systems--production for use rather than production for accumulation.[8]  All economic agents in traditional times save the “lords” (κυρίοις) were householders—producers for use of others (and for their own subsistence) rather than producers for accumulation. 

A different economic system is implied by this parable than what is familiar to us now, but from the exegesis suggested, we see that Jesus is universalizing a message for obedience.  The form of the verb δύναται  in the opening phrase as a 3rd person singular heightens the sense that Jesus is delivering a parable about an economic agent, while the verb is repeated in the last phrase as a 2nd person plural δύνασθε.  By this switch of verbal person and number, again we see how Jesus is both speaking parabolically and universally (paraenetically). He extends an illustration in the third person singular to a second person plural application of “ability.”  “You are not able to serve both God and mammon.”   Δύναται can suggest capability and/or possibility.[9]  With the negative particle οὐ as in οὐ δύνασθε there is the message of constrained capability.  As we have seen that this is a parable of servanthood and householding, the constrained capability can be read either as a household’s servant’s lack of free will in matters of householding, or rather a compunction or binding of that will.  I submit that as we read this passage as a parable, there is no suggestion that servants lacks free will in this matter of loving God or mammon, or of serving two masters. Rather, the constrained capability of serving the master  and God economically is one of choice or possibility. The linkage of the main verbs in this passage --Δουλεύειν and Δύναται-- signals the virtue or capacity of servanthood which is the servant’s capability. The two verbs complement the conceptualization (internal grammatical structure) of virtue of taking the servant’s role. There is an expectation that the virtuous servant fulfills the expected task. Jesus parabolically is demonstrating that there is no capability or meaningful possibility to serve two masters, yet there is an expectation of obedience in economic service.  It is clear that Jesus’s parable, without using command or imperative language, has the expectation of obedience to God’s economic justice that accepts our free potentiality to disobey and attempt the alternative: the fruitless service of mammon. This is a parable of duty rather than charity. Moreover, the linkage in the phrase of the AC has framed its call to repentance of the witnessing church in Creation/liberation theology (Rom 8) and in economic duty (Lk 16).  Jesus’ parable of a farmer receiving a windfall harvest and foolishly building bigger barns to retire (Lk 12.13-21) harmonizes with Luke 16 that the householding function is not an accumulative economic system.[9]  By its framing of worldwide economic context by means of Luke 16, AC is requiring the witnessing church to repent of accumulation economics going by the post-colonial name of “neoliberalism.”[10]

We still need to confront the objection that the Gospel is something distinct from the Creation/liberationist impulse and economic duties in Jesus’s parables.  There may be the claim that Gospel is succinctly Paul’s message that he normalizes in 1 Cor 15 1-3.  Paul anathematizes (Gal 1.8-9) alternative or supplemental presentations of the Gospel.  If Reformed Confessions are only legitimated by watchguarding and correcting presentations of the “authentic “gospel of salvation from hell, then AC might fail to update and contextualize that gospel for present day challenges.  AC thus further contextualizes the Gospel and its applicability in God’s covenant with Noah (Gen 9).  While AC does not ask, I believe that adequate study of AC involves considering whether God’s purposes of sharing the Gospel requires adequate resources and education for individuals to receive the message of reconciliation and salvation.  Does a neoliberal globalized economy of differential accumulation that results in 14 million yearly deaths of children from malnutrition and inadequate health care serve this gospel program?

PCUSA has missionary values that share the Gospel through poverty alleviation via its Presbyterian Mission Agency and fairness in food distribution and access as part of its Global Compassion, Peace, and Justice Initiative. In addition to the Scriptural presentation, there is an empirical refutation of accumulationist economics in the limits to growth or steady state perspective of critical economics.[11]  My academic background in critical economics with Herman Daly at the University of Maryland in the 1990s prepared me for empirical and theoretical criticism of the dominant globalizing paradigm of what was then termed the “Washington Consensus.”   My research problem was to convince my peers and advisors that the public good included a very specific program to make sure that financial centralization does no harm to the poor or the environmentally marginalized and instead devotes resources to these populations.  I engaged in research into the mechanisms, actors, and policies of Trade Theory and I began to conclude that Economic Globalization was not an inevitable product of western capitalism, but a concerted technical effort of a coordinated body of institutions and multilateral agreements to promote accumulation by politically powerful and favored parties.  I also concluded that these mechanisms were designed to, and would in effect, serve established concentrated financial power, disestablishing labor unions, off shore jobs, and play national social and environmental regulations off of each other in a “race to the bottom” harmonization of standards as nations competed to attract capital and gain membership into the multilateral economic policy making councils.  Regardless of the effects on my personal economic future, I concluded this move of globalization and capital concentration violated my understanding of political and ethical justification.  Specifically, it failed a Rawlsian test of justice  by not only failing to improve the lot of the socially and environmentally worst off, but in reality very likely would bring about their further marginalization and misery. [12]

 I believe in the 17 years that have followed, observers of good will have seen that reality of what I concluded in 1997 coming true in the form of increased environmental degradation, the increased vulnerability of the poor to environmental degradation, rising economic inequality, decreased labor power as jobs have been shifted off shore according the absolute lowest costs of production, and a general weakening of sovereign states to pursue independent and targeted social, environmental, and economic policy and regulation in the face of concentrating and mobile financial power.

By 2014 more policy actors are cognizant of the excesses of financial globalization. Indeed, since the financial crisis of 2008/9, financial globalization has been rolled back for want of a controlling authority. Domestic central banks are trying to cooperate in order to harmonize a global financial system.  U.S. job offshoring has slowed, though MAI-like provisions are being negotiated anew in the current Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP] and Trade in Services Agreement [TiSA] processes. 

I am mindful that God is radically equalitarian, contrary to the presuppositions and intentions of accumulationist economics. The parable of the vineyard owner (Luke 20.9-13) demonstrates that Jesus sees God not only remunerating all workers equally, but that the workers who worked the longest received their wages last.  Human considerations from the perspective of accumulationist economics are labeled by the Center of Value with the vice of “envy:”

Matthew 20.1 (NRSV) “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. 2 After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. 3 When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; 4 and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. 5 When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. 6 And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ 7 They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ 8 When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ 9 When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. 10 Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage.c 11 And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, 12 saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ 13 But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? 14 Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. 15 Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ 16 So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

20.15 finishes, ἢ ὁ ὀφθαλμός σου πονηρός ἐστιν ὅτι ἐγὼ ἀγαθός εἰμι; which is literally translated, “or is your eye evil that I am good?”  The Vineyard owner as a proxy for the divine Judge is terming the acquisitive economic agent “evil.” It is his own equalitarian distributions that are in contrast “good.”

Culturally, I have considered AC and the Reformed theological distinctives that contextualize an “economic justice message.”  I continue to ask, Do Presbyterian distinctives or structures have some contribution to make to the rejection of and repentance from neoliberal greed? F-1.0205 of the PCUSA Book of Order captioned, “Christ Is the Foundation of the Church” notes the ecumenical foundation of the gospel which harmonizes with the equalitarian parables noted previously.   Specifically, the PCUSA includes in its great missionary ends the “embrace of men, women, and children of all times, places, races, nations, ages, conditions, and stations in life.”

F-1.0304 The Great Ends of [its] Church include: “the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind; the shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God; the maintenance of divine worship; the preservation of the truth; the promotion of social righteousness; and the exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.

F-1.0402 Ecumenicity: “[Central to] the faith of the Reformed tradition…is the affirmation of the majesty, holiness, and providence of God who in Christ and by the power of the Spirit creates, sustains, rules, and redeems the world in the freedom of sovereign righteousness and love.” In this Presbyterian focus on Providence, the worldly fact of inequality and privation needs to be harmonized with God’s sovereignty over differential but just provisioning implied by a political reading of Romans 9:

Rom 9.14 What then are we to say? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! 15 For he says to Moses,    “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,   and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”  16 So it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy. 17 For the scripture says to Pharaoh, “I have raised you up for the very purpose of showing my power in you, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” 18 So then he has mercy on whomever he chooses, and he hardens the heart of whomever he chooses.

More theological work is necessary to harmonize Biblical economic principles with the Reformed confessional emphasis on God’s providence.  

Amos 2.6:

“6 This is what the Lord says:

“For three sins of Israel,

even for four, I will not relent.

They sell the innocent for silver,

and the needy for a pair of sandals.” –Amos 2:6 (NIV)

“...selling even the sweepings with the wheat.” Amos 8.6

Amos lived in the 8th C BCE northern kingdom of Israel, its fate according to the prophet was contingent on how it structured provisioning for the poor.  Likewise the fate of all nations that history has extinguished or is currently contingently tolerating?  While charitable ministry and patriotism—especially the jingoism that characterizes much of contemporary American nationalism—have always seemed to me to be in opposition, I am increasingly led to the necessity of ministry, prayer, and critical resistance to injustice as patriotic acts.  By remediating injustice and economic privation, we who claim to be  Christians in America move to prolong the life-giving forces of the planet to prolong life. That must serve the Creator of life. If we circumscribe or inhibit tenure and access to the deprived, we can be sure that God will take away our access to the necessities of life and tenure in the land in due time.  Repenting the neoliberalism that calls forth the cries of anguish from the global south in the AC may very well lead God to repent extinguishing the American national destiny and political experiment. I am not optimistic: history is replete with tragedy, and the contemporary worldly economy seems in the throes of environmental and social dislocation and catastrophe. My optimism, though, is more deeply founded on the confessional extension of the Gospel to considerations of re-creative and salvific justice for all of God’s children.

---

[1] https://www.pcusa.org/site_media/media/uploads/hunger/pdf/accra-confession.pdf accessed 15 October 2014.

[2] Karl Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions. Trans. Darrell L. and Judith J. Guder. Columbia Series in Reformed Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002, pp. ix-x.

[3] See also Mt. 11.28.

[4] Synod of Dort. Barth (2002, p. 216)

[5] http://www.creeds.net/reformed/confess67.pdf accessed 15 October 2014

[6] Also Mt 6.24.

[7] Nestle, E., Nestle, E., Aland, B., Aland, K., Karavidopoulos, J., Martini, C. M., & Metzger, B. M. (1993). The Greek New Testament (27th ed., Lk 16:13). Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft.

[8] Householding, reciprocity, and redistribution comprised the scheme of traditional economies prior to the advent of the monolithic, self-regulating market.  Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of our Time. Boston: Beacon, 1944, pp. 52-5.

[9] “Windfall.” Sermon by Douglas Olds, August 4, 2013. http://www.togetherweserve.org/windfall/ accessed on 15 October 2014.

[10] Also known as “University of Chicago Boys” monetarism (ca. 1968-71)

International Monetary Fund/World Bank Structural Adjustment (ca. 1980s)

Globalization and Free Trade (ca. 1990s)

Washington Consensus (ca. 2000s)

Neoliberalism (ca. 2010 ff)

[11]Contemporarily described at http://steadystate.org/ and various linked sites.

[12] The "difference principle" proposes to allocate resources and rights first to those most lacking, then as resources and rights remain available, other populations receive distributions, with the most well off receiving the last distributions. Alternatively, inequality is permitted so long as that inequality helps the least well off.  Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1971.

[13] See John Piper’s scriptural list of God’s repentant moves (and God’s refusals to repent) at http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-repentance-of-god accessed 15 October 2014.