Redeeming Mammon: A theology of economic power

Introduction

This is a theological essay about economic power. Economics, the ordering of

God’s household, has always been a central theological concern. As Douglas Meeks

demonstrates, ‘Economist’ is an appropriate biblical metaphor for God, as “biblical

God language is fundamentally economic.”1 The biblical God is forever concerned

about God’s household arrangements, the oikonomos tou theou. Economics at its

most basic is the study of household arrangements, whether it be the arrangements of

the extended familial household, the wider local community, or the national and

global households which we find ourselves members of today. Both economics and

theology contend for the meaning of the redemption of the household.2

The work of Walter Wink provides an interesting and illuminating paradigm

for considering the theology of economic power. Writing in the eighties and early

nineties, Wink was the first modern theologian and biblical scholar to undertake a

serious exegesis and interpretation of the New Testament ‘Principalities and Powers’.

What he discovered was a compelling and insightful perspective on the structure and

spirituality of institutional power. Wink laments on the one side those who have

understood ‘the Powers’ either as ‘demons in the air’, with no earthly institutional

grounding, and those on the other side who have identified the Powers ‘without

remainder’ as institutions, structures and systems:

“In the biblical view [the Powers] are both visible and invisible, earthly and

heavenly, spiritual and institutional. The Powers possess an outer, physical

manifestation (buildings, portfolios, personnel, trucks, fax machines) and an inner

spirituality, or corporate culture, or collective personality. The Powers are the

simultaneity of an outer, visible structure and an inner, spiritual reality. The Powers,

properly speaking, are not just the spirituality of institutions, but their outer

manifestations as well.”3

The ancient worldview, reflected in the Bible, sees every earthy nation as

having a heavenly counterpart. For instance, the angel in Daniel’s vision was

detained by “the prince of the Persian kingdom”, whom Daniel then equates with “the

king of Persia” (Dan. 10.13). It is not that the ‘prince’ is a sort of disembodied

‘guardian angel’ of Persia. Rather, the prince and the kingdom are both Persia, in its

heavenly and earthly manifestations. This worldview holds together both the physical

and spiritual aspects of existence, affirming the validity of each. It is distinguishable

from the opposing dualisms of Gnosticism and Materialism, which both sharply

divide the spiritual and the material, locating ‘reality’ either in the former

(Gnosticism) or in the latter (Materialism). Christian theology has tended to react to

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the all-embracing materialism of modernity by conceding the material realm to

secular science, whilst inventing a “hermetically sealed” spiritual realm, safely hidden

from the probing of materialistic science, and has limited theological investigation to

this realm alone.

Neither Gnosticism nor Materialism, nor indeed the modern ‘theological’

solution will suffice. To get to grips with the biblical material, Wink suggests, we

need an ‘integral’ worldview – one that recognises both the inner spiritual realities of

things, while at the same time seeing this ‘withinness’ as inextricably related to their

outer physical manifestations. What the biblical authors experienced and called

‘Principalities and Powers’, argues Wink, was in fact real. “They were discerning the

actual spirituality at the centre of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of

their day… Institutions have an actual spiritual ethos, and we neglect this aspect of

institutional life to our peril.”4 Many Christians (and Jews) in the first century

perceived in the Roman Empire a demonic spirituality that they called Satan. But

they encountered this spirit in the institutional forms of Roman life: legions,

governors, crucifixions, taxation, etc. That spirit was the spirituality at the heart of

the Roman Empire, understood in the ancient worldview to be a spiritual being,

residing in heaven and representing Rome in the heavenly council. The worldview is

alien to most modern Westerners, and it is easier for us to grasp the truth that the

ancients were pointing to by formulating it in the integral worldview, whereby

‘Powers’ are the profound inward realities of institutions.

But are the Powers intrinsically malevolent? The tendency to identify them

with demons suggests they are, but at the same time they are a part of God’s good

Creation, created by Him, through Him and for Him (Col 1.16). What we must hold

together in our minds when contemplating the Powers, suggests Wink, is the same

threefold structure that we apply to human beings, and the cosmos as a whole:

The Powers are good.

The Powers are fallen.

The Powers must be redeemed.5

The Powers are not just evil, they are created by God to provide ways for

human beings to live together in justice and peace. Earthly institutions are vital for

the continuation of human life as we know it, precisely because “it is not good that

man should be alone” (Gen 2.18). But the Powers are not just good, they are also

caught up in the profound reality that we experience as fallen-ness, whereby humans,

institutions, and the world as a whole constantly fall short of the fullness of life

intended for us by the God of life. At the heart of this fallenness is an idolatry of

power, wealth, and domination that distorts human life, socially and institutionally,



often in quite wicked ways. But this state of fallenness must also be recognised as a

distortion, a state of being that is alien to our intrinsic nature (which is created good –

Gen 1.27; 31), both as individuals and as institutions. We experience this state of

idolatry as a slavery that, in our own strength, we are quite helpless to break free

from, and from which we need to be redeemed (Rom. 7.14-25). The Powers need

redemption too, and for the same reason that humans need redemption: they were

created in, through, and for the good and humanizing purposes of God in Christ

Jesus. We must engage the Powers, therefore, in order to see them transformed into

the life-giving institutions they were made to be.

The Simultaneity of creation, fall, and redemption means that God at one and the

same time upholds a given political or economic system, since some such system is

required to support human life; condemns that system insofar as it is destructive of

full human actualisation; and presses for its transformation into a more humane

order. Conservatives stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers the third.

The Christian is expected to hold together all three.6

So what exactly is this state of fallenness? From what do humans,

governments, universities and businesses need liberation? It is the system of

domination that characterises the modern world, but whose roots are quite ancient.

The Babylonian creation epic is one of the clearest reflections and religious

justifications for this system. In this myth, creation is an act of violence. The

children of Apsu, the gods, kill their Father pre-emptively and so their mother,

Tiamat, plots revenge. Marduk, the youngest god, slays his mother in an epic battle,

for which he demands chief and undisputed power in the assembly of the gods.

Marduk uses Tiamat’s dead body to create the cosmos, and so the foundation of the

world is an act of violence. Order is established by means of disorder. Chaos

(symbolised by Tiamat) is prior to order (represented by Marduk, high god of

Babylon). Evil precedes good. The gods themselves are violent:

Religion exists to legitimate power and privilege. Life is combat. Any form of order

is preferable to chaos, according to this myth. Ours is neither a perfect nor perfectible

world; it is theatre of perpetual conflict in which the prize goes to the strong. Peace

through war, security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from

this ancient historical religion, and they form the solid bedrock on which the

Domination System is founded in every society.7

This basic myth is still perpetuated, Wink maintains, in the cartoons that our

children read to the spy thrillers, westerns, cop shows, combat programmes, and other

oversimplified rubbish that fill the airwaves.



The ‘Myth of Redemptive Violence’ is the story of the victory of order over

chaos by means of violence. It is the ideology of conquest, the original religion of the

status quo. The gods favour those who conquer. Conversely, whoever conquers must

have the favour of the gods. The common people exist to perpetuate the advantage

that the gods have conferred upon the king, the aristocracy, and the priesthood.

The Genesis creation myth, formulated by the Hebrews enslaved in Babylon,

is the very opposite of this violent tale. For the ancient Israelites creation is originally

peaceful. God creates a good world, not through violence or subduing chaos, but by

simply speaking. Chaos, evil and violence enter the world later, as a result of human

sin, not as a necessary precondition for life. As such, violence is a distortion – a

basically good reality is corrupted by the free actions of human beings. Violence is

no longer merely the way of things, but a problem requiring a solution.

The prophets understood this as they took a stand against the repressive

violence of people and kingdoms. ‘Be Holy because I am holy’ (Lev. 11.44) was a

call to a radical separation from the values of the ancient world. Israel were to be a

people who scorned the violent gods of the surrounding nations as idols of power,

invented by humans, and not representative of true divinity.

Jesus revealed definitively God’s domination-free order of nonviolent love.

His teaching was foreshadowed by the message of the prophets, that God is on the

side of the oppressed, and entirely opposed to violence and domination. Jesus

elevates the derided ‘feminine’ virtues of mutual responsibility, compassion,

gentleness and love, and showed extraordinary concern for the outcasts and

marginalised in society. The Jesus movement was a nonviolent movement of

compassion and equality. The Domination System, however, proved too strong even

for the church, and with the conversion of Constantine and the advent of

Christendom, the dream of Jesus became a nightmare. Christendom gave way to

more recent, secular totalitarianisms, in which the conquest of women went hand in

hand with the exploitation of the poor, the conquest of weaker nations, and the rape of

the environment.

There have been egalitarian resurgences throughout this dark era, such as the

Franciscans, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the civil rights movement and the

feminist movement. These groups all achieved progress, but none of them has been

able to overturn belief in the fundamental right of some to dominate others.

The major force of domination in the world today, I contend, is the global

economy or, more specifically, ‘the Market’ elevated to a transcendent position as the

arbiter of all goods and services. The Market posits economic growth and profit as

ends in themselves, forever increasing the concentration of wealth and power in the

hands of a tiny minority, while denying life and livelihood to those who, due to lack

of property, or incapacity to work, are excluded from the Market. Those who are

fortunate enough to have employment find themselves in a relationship of domination,

with employers forced to cut pay and lower standards in order to be ‘competitive’ in

the Market. The Market is essentially narcissistic and individualistic, pitting human

life against human life and reducing people to ‘consumers’, while destroying complex

traditions, cultures, bio-systems and, ultimately, the biosphere itself, in the endless

quest for accumulation and growth.

Markets are not intrinsically evil, of course. They are essential for any

developed nation that wishes to distribute goods. Any society that has developed

beyond subsistence level needs some means of exchanging commodities, and markets

have provided that means successfully for centuries, and viable alternatives are not

forthcoming. As Meeks points out, even Russian communism and Soviet satellites

couldn’t avoid trading in markets.8 However, the Market is fallen, and has

idolatrously set itself up in the holy of holies, presenting itself as the ultimate spiritual

good.

The spirituality of the contemporary global economy is the god Mammon.

Money becomes Mammon when it ceases to serve the common good, and becomes an

end in itself. Modern capitalism has made wealth the highest value. We are enslaved

to Mammon, and desperately need redemption, but Mammon fools us into willing our

slavery. Money offers itself as the ultimate liberator, but the acquisition of money

requires time, attention and devotion – Mastery of money turns out to be slavery of

Mammon.

The Kingdom of Mammon exercises constraint by invisible chains and drives its

slaves with invisible prods... But Mammon is wiser in its way than the dictator, for

money enslaves not through force but by love.9

What constitutes wealth? This is a key theological question, because it is

really asking: what takes the place of the value of values? That place is currently

taken by money, I contend, an idolatry that threatens the existence of life itself.



Fallen

The central task of theology, as defined by Philip Goodchild, is the

determination of the value of values. It is precisely this role that money fulfils in the

modern world.1 Jesus’ ultimatum was radical – God or wealth (Matt. 6.24). Wealth is

personified as Mammon, a master who demands time, attention and devotion – the

very definition of worship. The service of Mammon is the essence of idolatry.

Mammon is all encompassing, demanding that all other values be subject to its

evaluation. For Mammon, nothing is beyond its reach; everything has a price, and

can be judged according to the transcendent value of money. As the Market

increasingly seeks to infiltrate every area of life, nothing is sacred any longer. All

goods – social, physical, spiritual – can be priced and recorded on the accountant’s

ledger, and those that can’t are discounted as worthless. Mammon is as totalitarian an

ideology as Maoism or Fascism.

The idolatry of the Market is destructive in three key areas: It destroys the

lives of other humans, perverts our relationship with nature, and alienates us from

God. In idolatry we erect walls which separate us from creation, from others, and

from God. 11

Historically, the idolatry of the Market as the supreme social value had its

roots not only in the industrial revolution, but in the ideology of property which

preceded it. The close of the fourteenth century saw the release of the serfs in Britain

and the beginning of the mass enclosure of the British Commons. With enclosure, a

new ideology of land took hold:

Land was no longer something people belonged to, but rather a commodity people

possessed. Land was reduced to a quantitative status and measured by its exchange

value. So, too, with people. Relationships were reorganized. Neighbours became

employees or contractors. Reciprocity was replaced with hourly wages. People sold

their time and labour where they used to share their toil. Human beings began to

view each other and everything around them in financial terms. Virtually everyone

and everything became negotiable and could be purchased at an appropriate price.12

English law codified this new right to exclusive private property without

social obligations. Property rights were then extended to patents, copyrights, and the

enforcement of private financial contracts. Property was now an absolute.

In the wake of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami developers grabbed land on the

beaches of Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Maldives, and Indonesia, expelling the indigenous

fishing populations who had lived there for centuries. Now, new luxury complexes,




highly profitable for the tourist industry, have grown up on many of these beaches,

while the impoverished tsunami survivors are detained in ‘temporary’ settlements,

barred from returning to the beaches. Those who did try to return were met by armed

guards, protecting the newly acquired property.

All private property must have arisen through land grabs, and conflict, because

once the Earth was the common property of all. Property rights are unjust because

property has always been obtained through conflict, at the expense of others.

Heinsohn and Steiger claim that the original property economy was

egalitarian, but the creditor-debtor mechanism within society brought forth

inequality. Debtors who could not repay their credits lost their land – their means of

subsistence – and had to go into debt bondage to pay off their loan, plus the added

interest. The creditors, on the other hand, continued to accumulate land and wealth.13

Property rights deny some the access to livelihood, while others use their

accumulated property to accumulate more for themselves. Those without property are

dependent and can easily be exploited, as indeed they are in the contemporary ‘free

trade’ economy:

“[F]ree trade profits from a reserve army of the unemployed who drive wages

down to subsistence levels in certain employment markets. Such free trade does not

facilitate economic growth for all but for the few, based on growing inequality. It

amounts to a liberalization of rent-seeking, monopoly, exploitation and usury.”14

Usury had been condemned by the Church precisely because it entailed exploitative

relations; turning the necessity of another into one’s own opportunity. Now these

exploitative relations are normative in the global Market.

Dominant Characteristics of the globalized capitalist economy include the

exploitation of workers, the exclusion of the poor by means of structural

unemployment, lower wages and worsening working conditions.

Alongside this, speculative finance, which produces no actual growth for the

economy, is booming, creating ever-expanding ‘bubbles’ of deregulated financial

capital which threaten to burst and destabilize the actual economy, as they did in

1929. But

Once the movement of capital is deregulated … then it is like a gas that has been let

out of a bottle. Capital cannot be restored without some stronger force of attraction

drawing back inward investment. Once capital has been liberated, it will be reluctant

to commit itself permanently to the economic fate of a particular nation and currency;

exchange in search of better prices and profits is the essential power of money. In

this respect, economic globalization is irreversible short of a breakdown in transport,

communications, banking or energy infrastructures. States that have released the



movement of capital have little choice but to subordinate all other political aims to

the attraction of investment, or risk losing the source of their power.15

Nixon’s closing of the ‘gold window’ underpinning the dollar, and opening up

the New York Stock Exchange, has been the most significant example of financial

deregulation. The government’s gamble has released financial forces that it cannot

directly control.

“Aristotle was prescient here: the use of money to make money, money that

bears interest, or the quest for profits for their own sake, have no determinate value

and so no place within the polis. The condemnation of usury derives from this

principle. For money that makes money leads to the acquisition of a power that has

no political essence or limits.”16 The power of accumulated money threatens to

overpower all existing values, and thus dismantle the social order through

appropriation, substitution and exchange. Money is not simply an instrument of

exchange – it dissolves prior social order and replaces it with the social order of the

market.

Transnational corporations are a major player in the contemporary property

economy. Having outgrown their national borders, these institutions have immense

power. They have developed a system of global sourcing, through which they can

exploit the smallest price advantage in any country, so as to put a product on the

Market at the lowest possible cost, and beat their competitors. Their aim is to achieve

a monopoly, and when they have done so they can dictate prices in the Market,

playing unions, suppliers and governments off against each other in order to save on

wages, storage, taxes and environmental protection costs. “The single-minded aim of

these companies is to maximise profits on their ivested capital. Social and

environmental obligations are largely eliminated.”17 Transnational Corporations put

increased pressure on governments to lower taxes and increase subsidies, essentially

stealing money from the public purse. Business creates debt for nations, but gives

nothing back. Governments borrow from business, and raise taxes in order to pay the

interest. In effect, taxpaying wage earners pay subsidies to private business

The most profitable public services tend to be privatized, so the Corporations

can profit from them, while the state takes on the increasing burden of non-profitable

essential services, as well as clearing up the mess which privatized companies leave

behind, such as state pensions for workers in privatized companies. As big businesses

try their hardest to reduce the social obligation of property we get “privatized profits

and nationalized losses.”18

An even more worrying phenomena is the privatization of the environment

and elements basic to life, such as water, air pollution, and seed patenting.





In 1980 the US supreme court, with a majority of one, declared that life is

patentable. Now, just ten multi-national corporations control 32 percent of the

world’s seed, manipulated and patented exclusively to these companies. The

manipulation of the seed’s genes often involves introducing ‘terminator genes’ into

the plant’s makeup, so that farmers cannot gather any seed for the next year, and are

locked into dependence upon these TNCs. Many farmers simply have to give up, and

this brings a massive threat to the food supply of two thirds of the world. The

biodiversity of entire regions is threatened by monocultural seed monopolies, and this

brings further instabilities in food production. The possessive Market economy is

death-bringing.

Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), introduced by the WTO,

have banned the production of imitation drugs in developing countries, raising the

cost of health provision in these countries “by a factor of between five and ten.”19

“Property gives rise to the modern conflict between liberty and equality,

freedom and just distribution. How can we protect the free will of individuals in a

way that does not preclude equality, that is, the equal access of all persons to what

they need for their lives and what they need to contribute to the lives of others?”2

Property promises us freedom, but threatens domination. However, we must

distinguish between two different senses of property. Property as access to life is

different from property as power to exclude others. The capitalist global economy is

built upon the second sense. Property is an exclusive right of an individual or

corporation (which is granted the legal status of a person in US law), who can dispose

of it at will. Property-ownership comes with no social obligations attached; property

is purely and only the business of the property owner. Because only exclusive rights

can be marketed, the Market relies on the exclusion of some. The right not to be

excluded cannot be marketed, so has been sidelined.

The Church Fathers were highly critical of exclusive property rights. “Didn’t

God make the earth in common for all?” asked Ambrose.21 In that case, agreed John

Chrysostom, “the root of accumulated wealth must be injustice.”22

Property as an exclusive right to both use and dispose of things is bound to

result in inequality of wealth and power. The wealthy property owners get wealthier

at the expense of the poor. Aristotle also understood that the limitless accumulation

of wealth created an illusion of immortality, and warned that in the pursuit of this

illusion the individual destroys community.23

The Market offers no project. Rather, it proclaims itself as the end of history.

“It offers nothing more, but makes a project for the entire future out of the misery of

the present.”24 This total Market requires a totalitarian political world power to







enforce the capitalist property economy in every corner of the world. The ‘war on

terror’ is this effort, with ‘terrorism’ defined loosely enough to include any resistance

to this imperial strategy.25

The Stock Market is the only measure of good. If the Stock Market rises, then

the war in Iraq must be a good thing. There is no other criteria.26 Klein demonstrates

how new, highly profitable private industries have been created out of the chaos in

Iraq, and the massive profits both Cheney and Rumsfeld made from their shares in

Halliburton and Gilead, by refusing to sell them whilst in office.27 Any pretence that

American political leaders are at all independent of big business interests has been

shattered by the brazenness of the Bush administration.

Market exchanges are supposedly egalitarian ones. Money is supposed to

dissolve oppressive social powers and leave equality in exchange. However, the party

with superior mobility can, in fact, act with progressively less restraint, and will profit

the most from transactions. The Market is supposedly benign because it merely acts

to produce in response to demands. However, demands are useless without money.

As is demonstrated by the current food crisis, it doesn’t matter how strong people’s

demands are, or how pressing their needs: if they are not supported by money then

they will be ineffective.28 There is a severe imbalance of power, then. A study by the

World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University

reported that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year

2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. By

contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global

wealth.29 In terms of the effectivity of demands, then, the ability of a wealthy elite to

realise evermore complex and expensive demands is far greater than the ability of the

majority of the world to realise basic demands. The disparity is blatant and shocking.

Demands are both a demand for the realization of some good or service, and

also an expression of an evaluation. “To lack money, therefore, is like lacking the

opportunity to vote, to speak in public or to publish: it is to lack an opportunity to

offer one’s evaluations for acceptance as socially validated evaluations.”3

Mastery of money is always service of Mammon. Jesus saw this clearly, as

demonstrated in his teaching on taxation. “Whose portrait is this? And whose

inscription?” (Mark 12.16) The money that first-century Palestinians dealt in was

forged in Rome, and would return to Rome through taxation. “Hence if wealth was

acquired through the use of money, and money belonged to Caesar, then mastery over

wealth was at the same time service of Caesar. To accumulate wealth was to

participate in a system of exploitation and extortion.”31








Philip Goodchild claims that “the absolute claim to private property, the

absolute precedence of self-interest and the absolute claim of the state to the

monopoly of violence all derive from the structure of absolution embodied in

money.”32 Absolution is essentially a religious matter, and the daily accumulation of

money expresses hope for this absolution from ongoing cares and demands. Money

promises salvation to the radical individual from societal obligations.

“The credit economy is a network of contracted servitude.”33 The one who

offers money, whether as a consumer or an employer, exercises power over the one to

whom money is offered. Money represents power, and we are willing to give our

lives to others in order to hold that sacred power in our hands.

In a peasant society, those in power see to it, by taxation, expropriation, debt, and

monopolistic control of prices, that the poor are never able to rise above their station.

In the modern economic system, the poor are kept compliant by the promise of

economic and social upward mobility, whereby individuals are able to rise above

their class without subjecting to criticism a system built on class inequality. In either

arrangement, brute economic control is given a mythological and ideological sanction

to guarantee that those who have most to lose from obedience to the ruling class

become its staunchest supporters.34

“The friction between biblical religion and any prevailing economics”, writes

Douglas Meeks “comes at the point of defining the household, at defining

economy.”35 The definition of economy has changed dramatically since the biblical

authors were writing, and especially since the industrial revolution and the advent of

the market society.

When the Market is elevated to the status of a god, then there is no area of life

that it cannot potentially determine. Even drinking water, clean air and health care

can be sold as commodities, claim the prophets of the Market. But the Market does

not distribute all social goods justly.

We must bear in mind that the Market is not reducible to the persons who

comprise it. It doesn’t matter whether or not the CEO and management of a

transnational corporation are greedy for profit or not; “the system is greedy on their

behalf.”36 Within the confines of the system an individual can make limited attempts

to be more humane – for instance, an employer can do his best to give staff a living

wage and comfortable working conditions. But he can’t raise salaries too sharply, as

he risks being put out of business by cheap imports and rising fuel costs. The system

is greedy on his behalf. It is not the CEOs and the TNCs that should be our major

target for reform, although we certainly can remind them of their social and






environmental responsibilities, but the system itself: “For we do not wrestle against

flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the

darkness of this age.” (Eph. 6.12)

Redeemable

“The real science of political economy, which has yet to be distinguished from

the bastard science, as medicine from witchcraft, and astronomy from

astrology, is that which teaches nations to desire and labour for the things

that lead to life: and which teaches them to scorn and destroy the things that

lead to destruction.” (John Ruskin, 1860)37

The imminent end of modernity requires a radical rethinking of political

economy on the part of governments, businesses, trade unions and churches

alike. Rapid climate change, overpopulation, and the depletion of natural

resources are set to come to a dramatic head sometime in the next three

decades.

Changes in the Earth’s climate have already begun, and many of the

processes under way, such as the melting of the ice caps and desertification,

are negative feedback loops that cannot be stopped. Dramatic changes in

temperature, triggered by man-made climate change, are inevitable, although

the exact shape of these changes, both globally and locally, is uncertain.38

The UK has been experiencing a spate of record-breaking weather, with

scorching Springtimes and soggy Summers39, and the Caribbean has been hit

with a succession of unusually intense cyclones. Meanwhile, higher than

average temperatures and low rainfall in water vulnerable areas are causing

drought, forest fires, and desertification.4 We cannot tell with any certainty

what the effects of rapid climate change will be over the next few decades.

Droughts, famines, floods, hurricanes and forest fires are likely, as is the

permanent flooding of low-lying countries and cities. Whether the global

temperature will soar or plummet, due to some as yet unknown mechanisms,

is less sure. “Prediction of the most basic conditions for continued human

existence becomes impossible.”41

Finite natural resources, combined with a burgeoning global

population, means that we are consuming more than the Earth can provide.

Since the 1980s we have been living beyond our ecological means. In 2007,

for instance, humanity used up about 30 percent more natural resources than nature

can regenerate in that same year, compared to 20 percent in 2002.42 We maintain this

overshoot by liquidating the planet’s natural resources. We cut down trees faster than

they re-grow, and catch fish at a rate faster than they repopulate. Mostly the effects of

overshoot are regional, as fertile soil, fresh water, and forests have limited

transportability. On a global scale, it will be the peaking of crude oil production that







causes the decisive collision between economic growth and ecological finitude.43

More oil has been produced than discovered in each of the past 30 years, and even the

most conservative of estimates predict the final peaking of oil production within three

decades, but it is likely to be far sooner.44 The problem is compounded by a booming

global population, with a corresponding demand for fossil fuels that is set to double

by 2035. “The collision between supply and demand must take place within a

decade.”45 Cheap, easily available oil has spurred on the population boom, and is

essential to the kind of industrial food production that has supported it. The advent of

Peak Oil will bring widespread famine, and a dramatic decrease in the global

population over the next 30 years.46 Tragedy may well be unavoidable.

Economic growth is clearly incompatible with ecological limits. Capitalism is

unsustainable. Capitalist investment, “guided by the maximization of profits, is

directed towards the maximization of rates of depletion. Such is the inevitable

contradiction of capitalism: it is necessarily self-destructive.”47

“What functions as God?”48 Is it the God who frees the slaves, oppressed and

the poor? Or is it the God of the Market?

The ‘God’ of the Market is absolute, monolithic, transcendent, independent

and impassable. He is the image of the ultimate property owner. Market

anthropology has replaced this transcendent God with the independent, property-

owning human being. The human is considered to be infinitely and irredeemably

desirous, a consumer by his very nature.49

As Douglas Meeks demonstrates, the doctrine of the Trinity provides a

critique of the Market’s metaphysical anthropology. Where Market ideology

imagines human beings in the image of an inscrutable, absolute Individual, the

experience of Christian revelation is that of the threefold God; the eternal communion

of Persons; the God who gives God’s self out of the fullness of God’s being, God’s

love. In God’s three-in-one being each Person is individual but there is no principal

of hierarchy or domination – they have all things in common, and give of themselves

freely. If we hold that humans are made in the image of this Trinitarian God, then we

affirm a radical critique of Market anthropology. Humans are not absolute

individuals, but are inescapably social. We are who we are in relationship with

others, and we cannot deny our common humanity.

The God of life unmasks and challenges the idols that legitimate power and

wealth, and call for human sacrifice.

The households of Pharoah and the households of Caesar, from which the

collective Judaeo-Christian consciousness emerged, were households of domination,

slavery, and death. “The Jewish and Christian ways of living in the ‘household of








God’ make them opposed to the definitions of economy given by Pharoah and

Caesar”5. The household of God was a household of freedom, as opposed to slavery,

of life as opposed to death, of the just distribution of the conditions of livelihood to

all, rather than the monopoly of land and wealth in the hands of an elite leadership.

The Torah forbade the charging of interest because it made people poor and

destroyed their means of livelihood. Often, the victims of interest would have to sell

themselves into slavery (Ex. 22.25; Deut 23.19-20; Lev. 25.35-38). The Law also

made provision for land-less residents, who were allowed to glean the left-over crop

at edge of the fields after harvest, and the hungry could enter the fields before harvest

to fill themselves (Lev. 19.9-10; Deut. 24.19-22; Deut. 23.24-25. Cf. also Matt. 12.1-

8).

What all these laws presuppose is that the right to the means of life supersedes

the right to land and produce.51 This is reinforced by the tithe law of Deut. 14.22-29,

which existed so that “the alien, the fatherless and the widow” could have access to

livelihood. Other laws that are concerned for the equality of class and wealth include

the injunctions on the Sabbath year and the Jubilee year, in which slaves are freed,

debts are cancelled, and land is redistributed. In these years the land is also allowed

to rest to regain its natural fertility. This law recognises the human race’s reliance

upon nature. Current industrial farming practices, which are doing untold damage to

soils and eco-systems, fail to recognise this, and are irreversibly damaging the habitats

we depend upon for survival.

Biblical prophets condemn the property-interest-seizure-debt slavery

mechanism as theft (cf. Micah 2.1-9; Isa. 1.23; 3.14; 5.8), and the law contains many

corrective mechanisms for returning lost land, livelihood, and liberty. These

economic reforms are without parallel in the ancient world. In Israel, the absoluteness

of property is rejected.

When Jesus laid out his devastating critique of wealth his disciples asked

“then who can be saved?” (Mark 10.26). The disciples had internalised the values of

the Domination System, which identifies wealth with blessedness. Jesus, informed by

the Deuternomistic and prophetic traditions, saw through this legitimization of

domination when he questioned the rich young ruler’s ethical credentials. Jesus

pointedly adds ‘do not defraud’ to ‘do not steal’ in his list of the commandments, a

hint that the man’s wealth is derived from oppressive structures. “One thing you

lack” Jesus informs him. Despite his protestations, the man hasn’t in fact kept the

whole law. Jesus’ solution for the young man – giving all he has to the poor – is not

an act of charity but of justice, repaying those he had defrauded with the help of

unjust economic mechanisms.



In the kingdom of God, priority is given to the weakest – to the poor, the sick,

the disabled, the prostitutes, the tax collectors and the sinners. “God’s economy

begins with those who have been excluded from the household.”52 “The gospel of

Jesus champions economic equality, because economic inequalities are the basis of

domination.”53

A sense of scarcity is necessary for the possessive Market economy to

function. If everyone had access to what they needed then Market mechanisms would

fail to work. Exclusive private property creates an artificial scarcity by denying some

people what they need, and there remains a malignant fear that there is not enough to

go around. This system creates greedy fearful possessors, who horde up their

belongings and refuse to share. False needs along with false scarcities are created

everywhere as advertisers convince us that we need such-and-such a product. The

scarcities become less physical and more psychological, spiritual, sexual, as the

advertisers target our perceived insecurities and inadequacies, offering their product

as the solution to our lack.

How different this is to the reign of God: “You are already filled. Already you

are rich”, declares Paul (1 Cor. 4.8)! In God we are rich, and the realization of our

wealth frees us from the grasping possessiveness of the Market. “For you know the

grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became

poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” (2 Cor. 8.9)

The abundance of God’s love removes the scarcity we instil with our spiritualized

love of things.54

When we are freed from the fear of scarcity we are freed to be generous.

When we realise the abundance of God’s riches for us we have no need to horde. The

first Christians, living in this realization, shared everything in common, and no-one

was lacking among them (Acts 4.35).

The solutions to poverty, hunger, unemployment, wealth discrepancy,

depletion of natural resources and the destruction of the ecosphere all seem to

undermine the most sacred assumptions about property as an exclusive divine right.55

But if we claim that all human beings have an equal right to life (and we surely have

to), we must also concede that everyone requires access to the means by which they

can continue their life. This second right – the right of access to the means of

livelihood – is so self-evident, that the onus of proof is surely on those who would

defend the right of a few to deny others their livelihood.





The elites continue to teach, contrary to all the evidence, that enough profit

eventually profits everyone. We must choose, claims Meeks, between wealth and

justice. We cannot have both.56

The alternative between capitalist private property and state ownership is

false, and must be resisted. ‘If there are only two choices, choose the third’, as the

proverb says. Life is fuller and more varied than the economic fundamentalisms often

imposed upon it. The bible doesn’t advocate any absolute system of ownership, but

starts from the perspective of God, who hears the cries of the oppressed, and the

creation (Rom 8.22-26). The basic character of property, then, whatever particular

form it takes, is its usefulness for the common good, the common good defined as the

welfare of the poorest members of society. In that context, the most compelling

system of property ownership has to be that of local cooperatives, which represent the

self-determination of the masses. Land is owned, not by a radical individual, but by

the local community. Each member has the right of usage, but no-one has the right of

dominium. All levels of economy must be reorganized from the perspective and

interest of local people. 57

Work needs to be democratized – Duchrow and Hinkelammert suggest a basic

income for all citizens would eliminate wage slavery, and give people the freedom of

flexible employment. This system eliminates the need for all other social benefits, so

it also has the benefit of downsizing a bloated bureaucracy.

Public services such as water, transport, communication, education, health,

and energy need to be provided affordably to all citizens.

Renewable energy technologies must be invested in and developed urgently,

both for small-scale, decentralized energy production, and nationally in the form of

large wind-towers and solar power.

The democratic international organizations – i.e. the UN and its economic

organizations – should be strengthened, while the WTO is weakened, or else

democratized.

The patenting of life forms and medical drugs must be reversed. Companies

cannot be allowed to sell costly AIDs and malaria drugs to countries suffering

pandemics. Governments, not corporations, should have control over the healing

forces of nature. The control of seed distribution must also be wrestled back from the

seed giants like Monsanto and given to the State, to enable all farmers to cultivate

their own seeds.

Alternative scales to GDP are vital for assessing the true success of

economies, scales that take into account the well-being of society as a whole, and the



poorest members in particular. The UNDP’s ‘Human Development Index (HDI) is

one such attempt, and there will be others. The crucial point is that social and

environmental factors must be included in any measure of economic success.

Part of the resistance to the ever-increasing influence of the Market in

all areas of life will be the conscious resistance of those who choose to defy

its pretensions of divinity. Local communities, who choose to organize their

trading and relationships independently of the global Market, are iconoclasts,

reminding us that money is not the true ‘value of values’, and that societal

bonds, relationships, work, leisure, art and love are cannot be evaluated by

their profitability. A refusal to consider life in terms of its functional

‘usefulness’ will go a long way toward liberating us from our captivity to

Mammon. ‘Time is money’ is a well-worn slogan, but its implications are

frightening. Humans beings are not cogs on some giant machine.58 The Sabbath was

instigated, during the Babylonian captivity, from precisely this intuition. The biblical

authors opposed the Babylonian creation myth not just because it pictured violence as

the primal reality – humans, in the myth, are created as slaves of the gods, with no

purpose other than toil and drudgery. The Sabbath, on the other hand, affirms our

humanity just as we are, without having to do anything or strive to be anyone. “What

is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?”59 The joy of leisure is

that it serves no useful purpose, and as such it is a protest against the Market, and its

joyless functionality.

In Latin America many popular movements are working to safeguard

against the worst effects of the rampant global Market. The privatization of the

water supply in Cochabamba, Bolivia by Bechtel in 1999, leading to a 35% price hike

and the outlawing of rainwater collection, was brought to an end by continuous

nonviolent protests in the city.6 Bolivia has, for the first time, elected a president

from the indigenous community, Evo Morales, who came to power on the

back of widespread popular political involvement. Morales has made bold

moves toward land reform and modest wealth redistribution – reforms that are

being vigorously opposed by the country’s wealthy right-wing elite, who are

attempting to form an autonomous region encompassing the wealthy eastern

province of Santa Cruz. These protesters, encouraged by US Ambassador

Philip Goldberg, have seized oil facilities and airports in the region, and are

apparently aggravating for US military intervention.61 Hugo Chavez, president

of Venezuela, has let it be known that Venezuelan troops will defend against

any such aggression.





In Venezuela there are now a network of thousands of neighbourhood

councils and co-ops, dispersed at the grass roots and community level,

across the country. Chavez, a great supporter of the co-ops, has the support

of a large majority of ordinary Venezuelans, who managed to overturn the

2002 attempted coup, despite the support of the corporate media and US

backing.62 Argentina, Ecuador and Chile all have popular governments who

have come to power on an anti-neo-liberal platform. In Brazil, the Landless

Peoples Movement (MST), a collection of a million and a half farmers, have

formed hundreds of cooperatives to reclaim unused land. Argentinean

workers have resuscitated two hundred-odd bankrupt businesses by turning

them into democratically run cooperatives. The solutions to Latin American

poverty are coming from the bottom, from those who have been worst hit by

the reckless neo-liberalism of the last 30 years. These farmers, workers, and

trade unionists are taking the power for their lives into their own hands at last.

The cooperatives in Venezuela are taking full advantage of government

contracts, and are offered first refusal for running tollbooths, health clinics,

and highway maintenance. The communities who use the resources are the

ones with power to manage them.

The Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) is a South

American trade agreement, designed to give countries independence from

Washington’s financial organizations, and help each nation to develop in its

best interests. The agreement means that “each country provides what it is

best placed to produce, in return for what it most needs, independent of global

market prices”63. Bolivia provides cut-price gas and Venezuela offers

subsidized oil to poorer countries. Cuba sends thousands of doctors to

provide free health care all over the continent, subsidized by Venezuelan oil

money, while training Latin American doctors at its medical schools.

ALBA is essentially a barter system, in which countries decide for themselves

what any given commodity or service is worth, rather than letting traders in

New York, Chicago or London set the prices for them. That makes trade far

less vulnerable to the kind of sudden price fluctuations that devastated Latin

American economies in the recent past.64

Thanks to high oil prices, Venezuela has emerged as a major lender to

developing countries, lessening the power of the IMF and giving troubled economies

alternatives to their rigid neo-liberal Structural Adjustment Programmes. Many Latin

American countries are now free of the Fund’s influence, and its power is waning.

(cite New Statesman article on IMF) In just three years the IMF’s lending has shrunk




from $81 billion to $11.8 billion worldwide.65 The World Bank, similarly, has

significantly diminished influence in the developing World, especially Latin

America. Ecuador suspended all loans from the Bank in April 2007, while Bolivia

withdrew from its arbitration court, the body where multinationals prosecute

governments for acting in the interests of their citizens.

Of course, Latin America will by no means be immune to the imminent oil

shock that will mark the end of the fossil-fuel economy. Venezuela’s oil wealth has

been a major driving force behind Latin American economic developments.

However, the model of well organised, local co-ops, who take responsibility for the

provision of many services, including food and healthcare, alongside the regional

barter trade that enables mutual cooperation and provision of essential imports, is the

best existing paradigm for the necessary transition to a post-oil world.

Private financial institutions must also be tackled, as their immense power to

create debt money at will is further widening the gap between rich and poor, and

driving irresponsible financial speculation that threatens to crash the system. We

need the State to assume the power of creating debt-free money, which could be used

to lessen the State’s debt and to provide a basic income for the whole population. 66

Why should banks be able to create money at the stroke of a pen, increasing both the

property of the wealthy and the debt of the country?

Debt cancellation for developing countries is essential, as the only alternative

is escalating debt spirals which the governments will never be able to pay off, and will

reduce their ability to care for the poorest in their nations.

At a local level, barter exchange of goods and services without money or

interest is a healthy alternative the domination of the debt-money economy.

The so-called ‘anti-globalization’ movement (in fact, it is anti-corporate

domination) has become more vocal and better organized in recent years. The 1999

WTO talks in Seattle collapsed, due largely to large scale nonviolent protests in the

city, which spurred the leaders of developing nations to belligerence in the face of

pressure. The protestors were, in effect, reminding the assembled world leaders of the

words of Psalm 29: “Ascribe to Yahweh glory and strength”, remember the

humanizing purposes you were created for. The sheer size and success of the protest

served as a reminder to the world of how profoundly anti-democratic the talks were,

and how unpopular the WTO’s imperial project is. The major obstacle to the

organization and reach of the movement has been the monopoly of the corporate

media, who are unwilling to give voice to those who defy their masters, let alone give



them a fair hearing. With the advent of the internet, and the alternative independent

media, this is starting to change.

How should the Church engage economic Powers in the world? The charter

of the Church in its struggle with the Powers is set out in Ephesians 3.10: “His intent

was that now, through the Church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made

known to the Principalities and Powers in the heavenly realms”. It is the Church’s

role to reveal God’s wisdom – His humanising purposes – to the Powers, in the hope

of their redemption. Wink discusses Psalm 29.1-2, which calls upon the Powers to

praise God: “Ascribe to Yahweh, O heavenly beings, ascribe to Yahweh glory and

strength.”

It is all so clear. We are simply to proclaim to IBM and Gulf + Western and the current

political administration and the pettifogging bureaucrat that they do not exist as ends in

themselves, but for the humanizing purposes of God as revealed in Jesus.67

The Church is one of many groups who struggle to humanise the Powers.

Fortunately, as Matthew 25 makes clear, God is not dependent on the Church. Those

who are considered blessed by God are those who, regardless of religious affiliation,

behave in loving ways toward the hungry, homeless, naked and prisoners. (Matt.

25.34-40) “Apparently Jesus’ God is interested in one thing only: whether we behave

in a way consistent with the divine order that is coming. Our religious preferences,

practices, and affiliations are, next to that, a matter of indifference.”68

How do we oppose evil without becoming evil ourselves? How do we protest

the violent actions of Transnational corporations and governments without resorting

to violence? The key is to be found in Jesus’ teaching on nonviolent direct action in

the Sermon on the Mount. Turning the other cheek, giving cloak as well as coat, and

going the extra mile are not invitations to become doormats, as Walter Wink

demonstrates, but a creative ‘third way’ of resisting evil. None of the injunctions

should be understood as timeless and unchanging. Rather, they should be understood

as spontaneous and inventive responses to oppressive situations, designed to expose

the system of dominion for what it is. By stripping naked in front of a Roman soldier

who had demanded your coat (an accepted practice at the time), you can reveal the

unjust practice for what it is, and shame your adversary, without disobeying the letter

of the law. An armed revolution in first-century Palestine could only end in disaster,

as the events that culminated in the destruction of the temple in 70 AD would prove.

Jesus proposes not an armed revolution, but a social revolution.

Nonviolence involves courage and commitment, but it is the only way to

effectively engage the Powers. The myth of redemptive violence is just that – a



myth. Violence always begets more violence, and animosity only escalates.

Forgiveness, reconciliation, and a reminder of their God-given purposes, is the only

way to achieve redemption of the Powers.

The goal is not only our becoming free from the Powers, however, but freeing the

Powers; not only reconciling people to God despite the Powers, but reconciling the

Powers to God (Col. 1.20)

Local, popular movements are crucial. Communities need to take

responsibility for their own destinies, and not rely on detached national and

international bureaucracies and corporations to have their best interests at heart. In

this respect, the ‘transition towns’ initiative in the UK is heartening, as towns and

cities up and down the country start to envision a peak-oil world, and their place

within it. The nurturing of local, sustainable agriculture has got to be at the heart of

these projects; without cheap, easily available oil our whole approach to food must

change. While we can’t rely on the massive level of food imports that we currently

do, we also can’t rely on large-scale industrial domestic agriculture, which is also oil-

intensive, and polluting. A post-oil economy will employ many more farm workers

than the UK currently employs – roughly 1 percent of the British workforce is

involved in agriculture; figures for a peak oil world would be between 20 and 50

percent69. Local, small-scale agriculture avoids the monoculture and desertification

that result from the industrial overworking of the soil.

The Market economy is opposed to God’s economy as it leaves no room for

God’s grace or God’s justice. “The more the market logic threatens to become the

church’s way of organizing its life, the more the economy of the church is defined by

the prevailing economy of society and the more market rules determine what we mean

by justice.”7

There are certain social goods that should never be allowed to be subjected to

Market logic, including family relationships, healthcare, education, food, and

housing. That this list sounds a little quaint and unrealistic is a mark of how

pervasive the idolatry of the Market is in our society. But if we maintain that these

social goods are the right of each and every human being then we must prevent at all

costs their subjection to a system of unequal distribution based on wealth, leading to

domination.

What should be the role of the Church in this? The danger for much of the

Church, of course, is that it won’t even recognise the radical evil of the totalitarian

neo-liberal crusade. The Church has been complicit in Nazism and Apartheid in the

past, and these systems were even explicit about their aims. The Transnational



Corporations, the Commercial Banks, the IMF, World Bank and WTO are much less

honest. Their imperial strategy of domination is dressed up in the guise of ‘free

trade’, ‘choice’, and ‘development’. The negative effects of economic globalization,

if they are admitted, are called ‘collateral damage’, yet it is this ‘unintentional’ harm –

the necessary consequence of a totalitarian system based on exclusive private

property, unlimited wealth acquisition, and debt money – that is causing the deaths of

untold millions, and the steady destruction of our Biosphere.

The Church must begin by confessing her guilt and complicity in this system

of death. By listening to the victims of the Market, and turning to the Bible, the

Church can begin to grasp the depths of the evil of this system.

The Church must reject the idol of the global Market, and all religious

legitimizations of imperial power. She should turn again to the radical teachings of

Jesus on wealth, and the prophetic rants against extortion, until their implications are

deeply ingrained in her identity. It is not just the poor who need saving from the

global Market. There is a need for us in the Western Church also, who are the

wealthiest congregations in the world, to be liberated from our entrapment to

property, work and consumption that serve to oppress others.

Individually and corporately, Christians in the wealthy congregations of the

global North can take steps to rid themselves of the idolatry of Mammon by choosing

to live simple lives. “Simplicity gives us the perspective and the courage to stand

against greed, vengeance, and violence. Simplicity gives us the framework to

experience generosity, magnanimity, and shalom.”71

Churches can take many practical steps, as institutions, to choose the economy

of life over the economy of death. For example, churches should not involve

themselves in financial speculation, and should refuse to invest in banks that do.

Churches can invest in cooperative or alternative banks that invest in ecological and

social causes, and they can call upon their congregations to do the same. Public

announcement of these steps would cause a stir, and go a long way towards damaging

the reputation of speculative investments.

The Church also needs to put pressure on the State to fulfil its God-given

humanizing purposes. She can challenge the government to shift the tax burden away

from workers and onto businesses, to disallow the patenting of seeds and life forms,

and to resist the privatization of important public services, such as healthcare,

transport, education, and energy. She can also demand the increase of debt-free

public money, moves towards cooperative ownership at local and regional levels, and

the restructuring of the international monetary organizations into democratic

institutions.


Conclusion

There are incredible challenges ahead. The human race is about to experience,

collectively, the biggest single shock of its entire history. The accumulation of rapid

global climate change, overpopulation, local and global environmental degradation,

and the peaking of global oil production spell a disaster of epic proportions.

Droughts, famines, forest fires, desertification, wars fought over natural resources,

destruction of entire low-lying countries and the flooding of coastal cities are almost

inevitable. In fact, they are all already occurring. The globalized neo-liberal

economy can survive most of these catastrophes, as the wealthiest elite, with their

hyper-mobile capital are able to secure the stability and most of the resources they

need to sustain their luxurious lifestyles, and of course the systems of global debt and

free trade are not eliminated by floods or fires, or even mass starvation.

The peaking of oil, however, will change global economic relations in

profound ways. Countries, and local communities especially, will need to achieve a

far greater level of self-sufficiency than they have currently, and key to this will be

the local organization of agricultural cooperatives, as we have seen recently in

Venezuela and Bolivia, and the forging of strong local communities, undergirded by a

level of national and international cooperation. The Church, as a local, national, and

international organization, can be instrumental in supporting this transition.

While some Christians may await the destruction of the Earth and its people

with apocalyptic glee, it is not my opinion that we can legitimate the suffering of

millions of human beings in the name of the God of life. The god of Hal Lindsay and

the god of the ‘prosperity gospel’ is a Marduk, who legitimates the myth of

redemptive violence. Satan masquerades as an angel of light, and the god Mammon is

no different. Many Christians are complicit in the perpetuation of the death-giving

aspects of the global Market, as they were in Nazi Germany and Apartheid South

Africa.

If the church is already beholden to our economic, political, and cultural interests, can

it serve God’s liberation of the poor and dying in the world?72

The Church needs to find ways of living as the Church in the twenty-first

century. The Church should be the place where the economy of God, from whose

livelihood no-one is excluded, is lived out prophetically in the world, while waiting

for, campaigning for, and praying for the eschatological overflowing of that life-

giving economy to the whole world.


We must not despair. Another World is possible, even if it doesn’t seem

likely. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, this much is

obvious. As a species, we are almost entirely unprepared for the tragedies that await

us. But the Christian hope is not a cheap optimism.

Optimism is the superficial view that everything's going to work out fine "because it

has to." That's not true, and in fact is a dangerous illusion. Hope, on the other hand, is

the confidence that there is ultimate meaning, even in loss, and that (from a Christian

point of view) everything works to the good in the fullness of time, even if it is only

given to us to know defeat and suffering in our place and time.73

Laissez-faire capitalism embodies this kind of optimism, and thus disregards

the crucial doctrine of the fall, and the necessary caution that must follow from it. In

contrast, the Christian gospel recognises the depth and disaster of sin and death, yet

still proclaims the victory of God in the midst of it. Our hope is in the death and

resurrection of Christ, not in inevitable progress. Things are getting worse, and will

get worse, but God’s purposes will prevail. That is the paradox of the Christian

gospel. That is our hope.


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1 Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1989, p. 29

2 Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1989, p. 19

3 Wink, W., Engaging The Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 1992), p. 3




7 Wink, W., “Facing The Myth of Redemptive Violence” (Ekklesia, 16/11/07), available on their website: http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/cpt/article_060823wink.shtml

8 Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1989), p. 37


1 Goodchild, P., Theology of Money (London: SCM, 2007), p. 223


12 Rifkin, J., The Biotech Century, p. 40f, quoted in Duchrow, U. & Hinkelammert, F. J., Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed Books, 2004), p. 32

13 Heinsohn ans Steiger (1996), summarized in Duchrow, U. & Hinkelammert, F. J., Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed Books, 2004), p. 7

14 Goodchild, P., Theology of Money, London: SCM, 2007, p. 144



17 Duchrow, U. & Hinkelammert, F. J., Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed Books, 2004), p. 97


19 Wörner, B., “Von Gen-Piraten und Patenten”, quoted in Duchrow, U. & Hinkelammert, F. J., Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed Books, 2004), p. 105


21 Quoted in Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1989), p. 106

22 Chrysostom, Epistolam I ad Timotheum, 12, 4, quoted at length in Ibid., p. 204 n. 17


24 Duchrow & Hinkelammert, Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed, 2004), p. 123

25 Cf. Duchrow & Hinkelammert, Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed, 2004), chapter 5


27 Klein, The Shock Doctrine (London: Penguin, 2008), chapter 15


29 “The World Distribution of Household Wealth”, 2008 UN-WIDER, available online at: http://www.wider.unu.edu/publications/working-papers/discussion-papers/2008/en_GB/dp2008-03/


31 Goodchild, P., Theology of Money, London: SCM, 2007, pp. 204-5

32 Goodchild, P., Theology of Money, London: SCM, 2007, p. 164


34 Wink, W., Engaging The Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 1992), pp. 113-4



37 Quoted in ‘Are You Happy?’, a study by the new economics foundation (nef), and published on their website: http://www.neweconomics.org/ (accessed 06/09/08)

38 Cf. National Research Council, Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises (National Academy Press, 2002), available online at: http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309074347 (accessed 09/09/08)

39 Michael McCarthy, “Extreme conditions: What's happening to our weather?”, The Independent, 28th August 2007

4 http://news.independent.co.uk/environment


42 Global Footprint Network: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?content=overshoot (accessed 10/09/08), see also the National Academy of Sciences, ‘Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the Human Economy’, 2002, online at: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=123129

43 Goodchild, P., Theology of Money (London: SCM, 2007), p. 51. Cf. also David Strahan, The Last Oil Shock (London: John Murray, 2007); Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over (Temple Lodge Publishers, 2003)



46 Ross McLuney, ‘Population, Energy and Economic Growth’, in McKillop (ed.), The Final Energy Crisis, p. 178, cited in Goodchild, P., Theology of Money (London: SCM, 2007), p. 52












58 Giles Fraser, “Humans are not just cogs in a vast machine”, Ekklesia 13/12/07

59 W. H. Davies, Leisure

6 Finnegan, W., ‘Leasing the Rain’, The New Yorker, 08/04/02, available online at: http://www.waterobservatory.org/library.cfm?refID=33711

61 ‘Bolivia ‘expels’ US Ambassador’, (Al Jazeera, 11/09/08): http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/09/20089110518745928.html; cf. also ‘The Ambassador of Ethnic Cleansing’, (Machetera, 03/05/08): http://machetera.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/the-ambassador-of-ethnic-cleansing/

62 Klein, N., The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 454

63 Emir Sader, quoted in Klein, N., The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 456






69 http://www.economywatch.com/agriculture/country-wide/uk.html; Colin Tudge in Simms & Smith (ed.), Do Good Lives Have to Cost The Earth? (London: Constable, 2008), p. 142


71 Foster, R., Money, Sex & Power (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), p. 87


73 Dreher, R., “Optimism versus hope” (06/08/07), http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2007/08/optimism-versus-hope.html (accessed 11/09/08)

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Redeeming Mammon: A theology of economic power