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This paper is adapted from a reflection presented at the School of Ministry, Whitley College, July 2008.

Some people may be tempted to assume that economics is a discipline autonomous from theology. William T Cavanaugh

the world is poised at a crisis point. We stand at a moment, a kairos, when crucial decisions must

be made about the environment, about food supplies, about economic policies and individual behaviour. Early last year we saw food riots not just in Haiti – where we might expect such things – but in over twenty countries. The World Bank estimates that food prices have risen 83% over three years, and warns that further increases could mean ‘seven lost years’ in the fight against poverty.2 Its president, Robert Zoellick, called for a ‘new deal on global food policy’

that would double World Bank agricultural lending to Sub-Saharan Africa and have sovereign wealth funds invest 1% of their global assets in Africa to stimulate ‘growth, development, and opportunity.’

More recently, the collapse of several major banks in the United States sent shock waves throughout global financial and investment sectors. Anxiety gripped relatively affluent groups as substantial sums vanished from superannuation funds and share portfolios. World leaders rushed to announce ‘emergency rescue packages’ to ‘restore consumer confidence’ and ‘protect economic growth.’

‘Growth, development and opportu-nity,’ ‘consumer confidence,’ ‘economic growth’ – this is the language of capitalism, but is it the language of God’s economy? The biblical witnesses consistently point us towards Sabbatical release from slavery, Jubilee release from debt, and the ‘year of the Lord’s favour.’ When Isaiah 61 is cited in the Gospel of Luke, the Jubilee tradition

is fulfilled, not cancelled. Isaiah linked the cancellation of debts and sins with social regeneration, a return from exile to a fertile Judah. It is this regeneration that Jesus spoke about as evidence of the kingdom of God.3

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release (aphesin) to the captives

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set at liberty (aphesis) those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.

(Luke 4:18-19, citing from Isa 61:1-2).

There is no distinction here between economic and ‘spiritual’ liberty. Similarly, in the prayer: ‘Forgive us our debts as we for-

The Church in the Economy of God deborah storie and Mark Brett

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give (set free) our debtors’ (Matt. 6:12), nei-ther Jesus nor Matthew draw a distinction between economic and ‘spiritual’ debts. As William Herzog puts it, forgiveness becomes a daily practice rather than a Sabbatical exception to ordinary life.5

So how can two Dutch economists who advocate restorative economics castigate the International Monetary Fund for operating according to ‘the Matthew principle’ – ‘to those who have, much will be given; from those who have little, even that will be taken away’?6 The reference is to the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25, which up until the time of Constantine was generally interpreted as a critique of the profit motive, rather than an endorsement of it. Before investigating this ironic inversion in the his-tory of interpreting the so-called ‘Matthew principle,’ let us reflect for a moment on more recent experience.

An Afghan window into ‘peasant hermeneutics’

One of us, Deborah Storie, spent six years as a development worker in rural Afghanistan. Listening to the hearthside conversations and whispered confidences of tenant farmers and daily labourers, she learnt how a landlord’s defence of random grace, ‘Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?’ (Matt. 20:15), rekindles the humilia-tion of men forced to beg for work on fields whose produce they once called their own. She observed how rarely, in contexts where labor nearly always exceeds demand, ‘the usual daily wage’ was a living wage. Deborah’s village neighbours taught her to see how the economic structures and systems that protect the interests of ‘the haves’ often take from the ‘have-nots’ what little they have:

I pause on my way through the village to admire the local governor/war-lord’s stal-lions, magnificent creatures I sometimes ride. The horses are stabled in our village over winter. My neighbour comes and stands beside me. ‘Aren’t they beauti-ful?’ I say. My neighbour is silent. This is unusual; he is a talkative man. I look at him, inquiring. He doesn’t return my gaze. Then, ‘Each horse eats 9 kilos of barley a day.’ He leaves, and I turn back to the horses. Each horse eats 9 kilos of barley. The warlord himself could hear it and agree. A development worker could note it down as an interesting piece of information. As a veterinarian, I could quibble about whether a horse really eats 9 kilos of barley a day, but that’s not the point. My neighbour knows that I know

what I need to know to put the jigsaw pieces together and get the point. Each year, as harvest approaches, I hear my neighbour’s children cry themselves to sleep each night. They are hungry. Each year after harvest I see the governor’s rep-resentatives go house to house, collecting tribute-barley when the granaries are full. I remember, in winter, the exhilaration of galloping over fresh snow, wind-whipped tears frozen on my cheeks, armed grooms following at a respectful distance. When collecting tribute-barley, the men with guns show little respect, come much closer, and sometimes use their guns. I do not go riding again.

Biblical parables about peasants, daily labourers and capricious landowners, indebtedness and tribute, economic and political violence, have immediate resonance in contemporary agrarian contexts. The life-experiences of landless peasants and artisans, particularly their subsistence anxiety and subjugation, have more than a little in com-mon with those of peasant and artisan com-munities in first century Palestine.

Rome was a slave-making, slave-depend-ant state. Its peace was as brutal as its economy was exploitative. A tiny minority of the population were wealthy; the vast majority were poor.7 Taxation was not used as a resource base for social services. It was a matter of tribute, with religious as well as economic and political significance. One side of the Tiberian denarius, for instance, bore an image of the head of Tiberius (14-37 CE) crowned with a laurel wreath, a symbol of divinity and victory. Its inscription was an abbreviated form of Tiberius Caesar Divi Augusti Filius Augustus. In this perilous power-laden context, speaking your mind in public was not something wise Jewish peasants and artisans were likely to do.

Discretion, not frankness, was the order of the day. As Afghans say, ‘Walls have mice; mice have ears.’

imagining the gospel as if from a ‘peasant perspective’

Luke locates the Parable of the Pounds within the story of Zacchaeus, after the exchange with ‘a certain ruler’ who turned away, sorrowful, because he was very rich (Luke 18:18-25). Luke has Jesus leave Jericho immediately after finishing the par-able (19:27).

Since the fourth century,8 the predomi-nant interpretations of Luke 19:11-27, and of the Parable of the Talents (Matt 25:14-30), promote and affirm the movement of resources depicted in the parables (from those who have nothing to those who have much). Most of these interpretations assume things that neither Luke nor Matthew say: that the masters represent Jesus or God, and that the Gospel writers use the parables to address ‘the problem of the delayed parou-sia.’ By conflating the two parables, ignor-ing their different narrative contexts, and cutting the Lukan parable into two allegedly ‘independent strands,’ interpreters contrive a separation between economics and politics that nowhere exists.

Compare this with two contemporary readings of Matt. 25:14-30 from marginal-ized groups. Listen, first, to the campesinos of Solentiname: 9

Oscar: That man… he looked for oth-ers who were exploiters like him, and he gave them money so they’d exploit the people and earn more and get double what he was leaving them.

…. But the guy that didn’t cooperate with them, he was conscientious because

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he didn’t have the strength to exploit his brothers and sisters… Then the boss got sore when he comes and hands back the same as what he’d been given…

If, unfortunately somebody comes along who is quite… interested in money, and unfortunately he starts to read this Gospel, and understands it in his own way, these words are going to make him worse than before.

Felipe: He couldn’t be so stupid…

Oscar: If they understood it there wouldn’t be any rich people.

Felipe: Rich people don’t even notice things like that!

A second reading comes from inmates of a maximum security prison in North America. The predominant interpretation constrained the inmates until their study companion asked a different type of question:10

Fortna: Which of those three slaves do you like best?

Smitty: I kinda dig that third dude.

Fortna: Let’s say you’re that guy... How do you feel about the boss who left you with all this money to invest for him?

Smitty (after a pause and then very slowly): Why that son-of-a-bitch!

Fortna: Why?

Smitty: He just part of the System. He tryin’ to use me to make his money for him... I gets the rap. He exploitin’ me man!

Fortna: So is he God?

Smitty: Course not. Who sayin’ that?

Both these groups instinctively notice how the first two slaves camouflage the economic realities their profits reflect: ‘Your pound has made ten more… Your pound has made five more.’ They notice, too, that the third slave exposes what the compliant slaves conceal, that money never makes money.

These contemporary ‘underclass read-ings’ are in sympathy with pre-Constantini-an interpretations which, available evidence suggests, praised the non-compliant slave.11

A number of contemporary biblical schol-

ars also support this alternative interpretive tradition.12

Neither Jesus nor the Gospel writers provide explicit interpretations of these para-bles. They trust their audiences to make the necessary connections and work out what it means for them. The only explicit judgments within the parables are made by the masters/slave owners and the noncompliant slaves. As readers, we choose whom to believe.

If we approach the parable of Luke 19:11-27 from the perspective of noblemen/slave-owners, we see everything being done properly – a ruler doing all he is entitled to do, some slaves serving well, and a stupid/lazy/cowardly slave being enlightened by his master. What’s more, if we start read-ing with the assumption that the master/nobleman represents God in some way, we shield the economic and political practices portrayed by the parable from any type of interrogation or critique. Read this way, the parable sounds a warning to serve the empire and its vassals whole-heartedly.

But remember that Jesus tells this par-able in Jericho to Zacchaeus and all those who first grumbled ‘Look he has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner’ (v.7) and then ‘supposed the Kingdom of God was to appear immediately’ (v.11). Even in this immediate narrative context, the contrast between the economic practices that Jesus affirms and those that the slave-owner expects is striking: Jesus celebrates Zacchaeus’ declaration to give away half his possessions and pay back anyone he defrauds, yet the slave-owner commends slaves who accumulate wealth for him and condemns the slave who does not.

The power dynamics, fissures and silences of the parable speak differently if we take an imaginative leap to hear the parable as if among the peasants, artisans, disciples, pros-titutes, tribute collectors, soldiers, scribes and Pharisees in Jericho. As surrogate members of the gospel world, our memories are seared by violent oppression, our lives scarred by deprivation and fear. We know that whatever Zacchaeus says, he will not tell the whole story and is likely to be misleading. We know that whatever we think about Zacchaeus, we dare not oppose him openly. Neither do we expect Jesus to spell out what he means; he wouldn’t be so stupid. Intuitively, we connect his words and silences with the jigsaw pieces of shared experience, memory and hope – the traditions of Ancient Israel, and our longing for the day of the Lord’s favor, for freedom, for Jubilee.

By taking the pound out of circulation, the third slave prevents it being used to further the slave-owner’s purposes, and dem-

onstrates how completely the exploitative system depends on the compliance of slaves. A profit cannot be turned unless retainers and slaves acquiesce to the master’s avarice. Resistant citizens will not be slaughtered if no-one obeys the tyrant’s command. Does anyone obey him? We are not told. Read this way, the parable exposes dynamics of exploi-tation and raises possibilities for resistance.

reading parables today

If parables are understood as ‘earthly stories with heavenly meanings’ an appropri-ate response to this parable might be ‘Isn’t the grace of God amazing!’ and do nothing. In Parables as Subversive Speech, William Herzog suggests that everything changes if we read Jesus’ parables as ‘earthy stories with heavy meanings.’ Disciples of Jesus are com-mitted to questions like: What is the word of God for us today? What bearing does this have on the way we live? These discipleship questions require us to analyse our own situ-ation as carefully as we do the worlds of the Gospel text.

Our world, like ancient Palestine, is highly stratified:

15% of the world’s population, includ-ing nine of ten Australians, consume 85% of the world’s resources.13 It is, however, no longer particularly helpful to speak of high and low income countries. In today’s glo-balised world, social, economic and power relations transcend national and regional boundaries.14 Chasms of income, opportu-nity, life-experience and expectations sepa-rate rich and poor within as well as between countries and regions. Although the rela-tionship between wealth and power is com-plex, they are strongly correlated, as are low incomes, lack of influence and restricted life opportunities. The one in ten Australians outside the top income bracket are likely to be Indigenous Australians, people living with a physical or mental disability, non-English speakers, or people living with addictions to alcohol or other drugs, gambling or other self-destructive behaviours.15

Global, regional and local inequalities are increasing because the world’s struc-tures, systems and institutions systemati-cally favour stronger over weaker players. As Jonathan Sacks observes, ‘In each individual transaction, both sides [may] gain. But when the results of billions of transactions are aggregated, their effects can be, and often are, massively inequitable.’16

Ankie Hoogvelt notes that despite mount-ing evidence to the contrary, many people still assume that supply will always rise to meet

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demand, and that capitalism can, in princi-ple at least, expand indefinitely to provide opportunities for all, alleviating poverty and improving living standards for most of the world’s inhabitants. Now that we are pushing up against the absolute limits of the earth’s resources, the reality is that when some peo-ple take more, others have less.

Today’s empires ‘stabilize’ entrenched disparities of wealth and power by ‘manag-ing’ the excluded majority through trade, migration and labor laws; information tech-nologies and the media; business invest-ment, debt and other forms of obligation; ‘peace-keeping’ and other military opera-tions; and, humanitarian and development interventions.18 Weapons comprise one-third of total world manufacturing trade.19 Most armed conflicts occur in oil-producing or oil-pipeline states or in regions rich in other ‘bankable’ resources.20

As a planet, we passed the ecological break-even point sometime in the 1970s or 80s.20

Since then, we have been using more of the earth’s resources than it can replace and weighing the earth down with more rubbish than it can deal with. This does not mean that the earth cannot support its cur-rent population. It does mean that the earth cannot support the escalating levels of con-sumption and waste production to which ‘bankable’ groups have grown accustomed.

The clear links between the over-con-sumption of developed nations, environmen-tal degradation, global poverty and conflict, present particular challenges for Australia. Per capita, Australians have the world’s sixth heaviest ecological footprints, about three times as large as the earth can sustain.21 While everything from food packaging, to house renovations and mobile phones matter, plane and car travel and air-conditioning are some of Australia’s most ecologically-damag-ing addictions. As Nazmul Chowdry from Practical Action in Bangladesh warns, ‘Forget about making poverty history; climate change will make poverty permanent.’23

Freedom is meaningless without approximate economic equality.24

Slavery is now illegal the world over, but whatever we call it, around 12.3 million people are victims of a global black market in coercive labour worth around $32 bil-lion annually.24 Millions more are enslaved by debts they can never repay.25 Behind all forms of coercive labour, lie systems and structures that sustain global inequities and enslave the poor (collateral damage?) in the process. As Jim Wallis puts it, ‘Poverty is the

new slavery.’27

In this global context, playing Zacchaeus (giving half our possessions to the poor) or being ‘generous’ employers (adding ‘social responsibility departments’ to corporations, ‘giving’ work to ‘beggars’) are necessary but painfully inadequate responses. Might this parable ask us, with Zacchaeus, to push back into the story and face up to the other, more difficult, side of these economic equations? What have we/our ancestors taken? How much are we taking away?

the burden of history and the gospel of hope

When we examine economic issues in light of the Bible, we need to face a number of difficulties head on. Just think: if legisla-tion to abolish slavery was only passed in the 19th century, then that leaves about eight-een centuries during which many Christians in the West seem to have accommodated themselves to slave-based economies, feu-dalism and then the resurgence of slavery within early capitalism. Protestant thinkers like Calvin led the way in replacing feudal hierarchies with the possibilities of produc-tive commerce, reinterpreting the sin of usury, for example.28 Although well-intend-ed, Calvin’s ‘reinterpretation’ paved the way for new manifestations of intergenerational debt-slavery to emerge and continue.

Did Jesus mean to draw a sharp distinc-tion between spiritual liberty and the ‘ordi-nary’ kind of liberty that ancient Israelite slaves were entitled to? We don’t think so. But somehow by the end of the first century the language of spirit and body in Greek culture had hardened into just that kind of distinction. And so Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, opposed the use of church funds to redeem slaves:

Do not be haughty to male or female slaves, yet do not let them be puffed up. Let them rather endure slavery to the glory of God, that they may obtain a better freedom from Christ. Let them not desire to be set free at the church’s expense, that they be not found the slaves of desire. (Epistle to Polycarp ~100 CE)29

Ignatius is clearly combating something that was actually taking place, but his argu-ment only makes sense within a conceptual framework that separates spiritual and physical slavery, severs the theology of salvation from its roots in the Hebrew Bible, and renders the embodied distress of slavery of secondary importance. Over time, Christians became

habituated to life within slave-dependent empires until the dominant Christian world-view could no longer imagine a society with-out slaves, and this split thinking hardened into doctrine. An analogous form of split thinking prevalent today separates faith and economics. Christian individuals and groups, churches, missions, and even aid and develop-ment agencies, are liable to accept and submit to economic models without subjecting them to biblical and theological critique.

To be sure, some Christian economists call for an ‘economy of care’ that will renew capitalism by cutting down its idols of growth, profit and consumption. They point out that an international market which depends on endlessly escalating levels of production and consumption necessarily produces environ-mental degredation, debt, deprivation, con-flict, and other deleterious effects. Some of these economists are concerned to discover the line below which these negative effects become coercive – the line below which, for example, a family in Thailand see no option but for their daughter to work in the sex industry to support her parents. This is what Albino Barrera calls ‘an unacceptable eco-nomic compulsion.’ He wants to use human rights arguments to constrain the market by establishing appropriate benchmarks.30

Perhaps this approach will eventually have some effect, and we should not tire of advancing economic rights arguments, but that cannot be our only strategy. The church cannot wait for the light of human rights to dawn. Our world will not be mended by investing in poorer countries to stimu-late ‘growth, development and opportunity’ as these are generally understood. Neither will the poor be saved by extending credit services (debt) to those on the fringes of the global economic system, enabling them to participate in processes which, being based on the logic of competition, inevitably produce ‘winners’ and ‘losers.’ The world needs structural changes oriented around redemption rather than profit. It needs, we suggest, a church that embodies and enacts this redemption.

A church with an economic conscience would put an end to split thinking. It would no longer contrast forgiveness of sin (aphesis) with deliverance from political oppression (aphesis). Listen to what the campesinos of Solentiname notice about Jesus’ interaction with Zacchaeus.31

Oscar: It sounds as if he [Zacchaeus] had done some stealing.

Felipe: Of course he had; if he hadn’t he wouldn’t have been rich.

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Olivia: This would be the end of his capital, because everything he had must have been stolen.

Cardenal: He must have been left with nothing as Olivia says. At first he only intended to give half of what he had, which according to him was honestly earned, and give back four times what he’d stolen. But afterward he’s gradually realized that everything he had was stolen…

William: For the Son of Man came to seek and save what was lost… (v.10) It is interesting that he [Jesus] says ‘what’ and it’s because he’s referring not only to people but also to things, to wealth. What’s in the hands of a few and lost to the majority. Christ has come to liberate wealth, making it shared, and naturally people will be liberated too.

The release/liberation Zacchaeus and the people of Jericho experienced was from both personal sin and structural sin experienced as oppression.

A church with an economic conscience would not allow us to reap the benefits of international flows of goods without ever pausing to ask who produced those goods and under what conditions. It would not allow congregations and their members to accept investment statements—’Your pound has made five more’—at face value. It would ask instead: What human realities do such statements camouflage? Are we reaping what we didn’t sow?

A church with an economic conscience would listen to those who unearth hidden stories of exploitation and economic coer-cion. Some of that exploitation happens in our own backyard.32 But much of it takes place much further away.

Jubilee motives require jubilee methods

Indigenous minorities are particularly vul-nerable to exploitation. The Malto Tribal People of the Rajman Hills, Bihar Province, for example, are among the most marginal-ized people-groups in India. Before EFICOR (Evangelical Fellowship of India Commission on Relief) began work with the Maltos, two experienced development facilitators spent several years learning Malto language and culture and studying community life.33 They discovered pervasive indebtedness with debilitating debt-servicing obligations and accompanying despair. In response, EFICOR introduced a Micro-Enterprise Development (MED) project and encouraged villagers to invest low interest loans in activities designed to generate income. EFICOR assumed that household incomes would improve, enabling debt repayments and alleviating poverty. They were wrong. Most enterprises failed. Villagers were demoralised, humiliated, and even deeper in debt. Church attendance dropped, relationships soured, and alcoholism, violence and other social problems increased. The MED project was hurting the people it was intended to help. EFICOR closed the project and forgave all debts.

Reflecting upon this experience, EFICOR regretted encouraging poor families to take risks they would have been wiser to avoid. Very poor people cannot afford to invest in ventures where benefits may take some time to realise or may not succeed. The problem was not that Maltos lacked business acumen and could not access credit, but rather, that they could not avoid debt and, once in debt, simply could not escape it.

Families incurred debt when they needed small amounts of money urgently for medi-cine or cultivation and had no reserves to draw on. Borrowers desperate for sums as

small as 50 rupees (one dollar) were forced to accept whatever terms a mahajan (money lender) set: their next crop, a quantity of firewood cut and delivered from the forest, the fruit of a mango tree, not just this season but every year until the mahajan demanded the tree’s wood instead.

EFICOR introduced cooperative savings-based ‘Self Help Groups’ more cautiously. SHGs are groups of ten to twelve women who meet weekly, saving tiny sums which they lend to group members as needs arise. When SHGs first formed, women generally used loans for emergencies, debt payments or consumption needs (food, health care, educa-tion and housing). After three to four years, most groups met internal borrowing needs, and discharged pre-existing debts. Once debt-free, SHGs provide emergency loans to other villagers, invest in community projects, and assume broader networking, decision-making and project coordination responsi-bilities. SHG members have been elected to Village Development Committees – the first Malto women in local governance!

Such a Jubilee practice restores human dignity, enabling communities to overcome damaging circumstances, to establish social mechanisms and livelihoods, and to avoid fall-ing prey once again to the original dangers.34 Yet while Malto communities have much to celebrate, they are facing new threats that they are powerless to resist on their own. The life-styles and expectations of India’s growing middle class require more and more resources (wood, water, agricultural land) and threaten the Maltos’ traditional way of life, their forests and land tenure, and even their lives.

no more business as usual

The devastating consequences of confus-ing the gospel of Christ with post-Enlight-enment notions of progress and civilization are now increasingly apparent. As Jonathan J Borg writes,

The gospel of plenty, carried obediently to the uttermost parts of the earth by its emissaries, is at last being appropriated by the vast populations of the non-Western world. Too late, those of us who have been its chief beneficiaries and advocates now realize that this ‘good news’ could doom the planet…

Only now are Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox missiologists starting to realize that their strategies for saving the world have been framed within a theological cocoon that prevented them from adequately understanding the end

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result of their civilization’s notions of progress, development, and the social material destiny of humankind. The planet is simply too small to accom-modate large numbers of human beings who think and live as we do.35

Now, as always, the way we read the Bible matters. Many of Jesus’ parables focus on money and power, unemployment and housing insecurity, on livelihoods, debt, slavery and business. Jesus came to proclaim good news to the poor, but somehow his parables have been used to support social and economic systems that the poor experi-ence as very bad news indeed. There are other ways of reading.

The current coincidence of ecological,

economic and social crises presents us with an opportunity to create a different type of future. In life, as in reading, choices need to be made.

The spirit of the holistic gospel sees beneath the camouflage of market rhetoric and, as William Wilberforce put it, stands against every ‘trade founded in iniquity.’ We co-operate with the mission of God when we put redemption at the centre of our economic life. Yes, Christian faith always includes more than this, but our faith must stand for noth-ing less than this. We must no longer dismiss ‘managed exclusion’ as a tragic but inevitable ‘negative pecuniary effect’ that stems from the invisible hand of the market. The market is not all powerful, and economics is not beyond the reach of the Gospel. Tyrants like

Zacchaeus do change direction. Slaves are not extensions of their masters. The way things are is not the way they shall be.

Mark Brett is Professor of Hebrew Bible at Whitley College, and was the Policy Officer at Native Title Services Victoria, 2005-2008.

His most recent book is Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire (2008).

Deborah Storie works as a veterinarian at the RSPCA, studies and teaches Biblical

Studies and Aid and Development, evaluates community development projects, and serves

as Deputy Chair of TEAR Australia. She expects to complete a PhD in Biblical Studies

through Whitley College/Melbourne College of Divinity this year.

endnotes:1 W. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian

Desire (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2007), p.vii.

2 http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21726628~pagePK:64257043~piPK:437376~theSitePK:4607,00.html. See further Steve Wiggins and Stephanie Levy, ‘Rising Food Prices: Cause for Concern,’ Overseas Development Institute, Natural Resource Perspectives 115, June 2008.

3 N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), pp.269–74.

4 The Septuagint uses aphesis (release) to translate a range of Hebrew words that signify the forgiveness of debts, the restoration of inherited land, or the release of slaves and other captives. See, e.g., Deut. 15:1,9,12-13, Lev. 25:10, 12, 41 as well as Isa. 61:1.

5 William R. Herzog, Jesus, Justice and the Reign of God (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000), pp.107-108.

6 Bob Goudzwaard and Harry de Lange, Beyond Poverty and Affluence: Toward an Economy of Care (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p.137. Cf. Bob Goodzwaard’s earlier critique of the ideology of progress, which he regards as common ground between liberalism and socialism. Capitalism and Progress: A Diagnosis of Western Society (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1997 [1st edn 1979]), pp.114-16.

7 A graphic representation of the relationship among classes in advanced agrarian societies is provided by Gerhard Len-ski, Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification, (McGraw-Hill: New York, 1966), p.284.

8 In 313 CE, Emperor Constantine guaranteed religious freedom to Christians, and in 380 CE, Emperor Theodo-sius made Christianity the state religion of Rome.

9 Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname, trans. Donald D Walsh, vol. 4 (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1982). For the campesinos’ full reading of Matthew 25:14-30, see pp.38-48.

10 Robert T. Fortna, ‘Reading Jesus’ Parable of the Talents through Underclass Eyes,’ Forum 8 (1992) 211-28.

11 For analysis and references, see Merrill Kitchen, ‘Reread-ing the Parable of the Pounds: A Social and Narrative Analysis of Luke 19.11-28,’ in Prophecy and Passion: Essays in Honor of Athol Gill, ed. David Neville (Adelaide: Australian Theological Forum, 2002), pp.227-46, 238f.

12 Richard L. Rohrbaugh, ‘A Peasant Reading of the Parable of the Talents/Pounds: A Text of Terror?,’ Biblical Theology Bulletin 23 (1993) 32-39; William R. Herzog, ‘The Vulner-ability of the Whistle-Blower: The Parable of the Talents,’

in Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994), pp.150-68; R. Allan Culpepper, ‘The Gospel of Luke: Introduction, Commentary, Reflections,’ in The New Interpreter’s Bible: Luke John, ed. E. Keck (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), pp.3-490, 358-364; Richard Q. Ford, The Parables of Jesus: Recovering the Art of Listening, (Minne-apolis: Fortress, 1997), pp. 32-46; Ched Myers, Jesus’ New Economy of Grace. Sojourners Magazine, 27/4 (1988), pp. 36-39, http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj9807&article=980724 ; Luise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), pp.181-187; and, Elizabeth Dowling, Taking Away the Pound Women: Theology and the Parable of the Pounds in the Gospel of Luke (London: T&T Clark, 2007).

13 United Nations Development Program, ‘Human Develop-ment Report 2006’ (New York: UNDP 2006), pp.269.

14 Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World (London: Palgrave, 2001). Hoogvelt estimates that 20 % of the world’s population are ‘bankable,’ fully integrated into the world economy. 30% are ‘insecure’ workers and their families whose livelihoods are threatened by global com-petition, cost-cutting pressures, technological innovations, capital mobility, and falling wages. The remaining 50% are effectively excluded from the global system.

15 World Bank, ‘World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development,’ (Oxford: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2006), pp.48-51; and, UNDP, ‘Human Development Report 2005,’ (New York: UNDP 2005), pp.51-71.

16 Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilisations (London: Continuum, 2003), pp.105.

17 Ankie Hoogvelt, ‘Intervention as the Management of Exclusion,’ (London: Open University, 2005), pp.28. See also http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/peacekeeping/reform/2002/ngo.htm

18 See http://fas.org/asmp/fast_facts.htm and WTO, ‘World Trade Organisation Annual Report,’ (2001).

19 Joseph Hanlon, ‘External Roots of Internal War.’ In Civil War, Civil Peace (Open University, 2005), pp.113-36.

20 Graphs, charts and further details available from ‘Living Planet Report 2008,’ ed. Chris Hails (World Wildlife Fund, Zoological Society of London, Global Footprint Network, 2008). Reliable information is also available from the websites of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED).

21 An ecological footprint represents the amount of the world’s resources required to sustain a lifestyle, both to produce the things consumed and to assimilate the waste produced.

22 Cited by Ben Thurley in his Editorial in Harambee: Advocacy and Action, September (2007), p.2.

23 This is Amartya Sen’s central thesis in Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor, 1999).

24 International Labor Office, ‘A Global Alliance against Force Labour,’ (Geneva: ILO, 2005), pp.12, 55. The combined profits of forced labor and human trafficking are estimated to be over 44 billion USD annually, Patrick Belser, ‘Forced Labor and Human Trafficking: Estimating the Profits,’ (Geneva: International Labor Office, 2005).

25 Approximately 15 million debt slaves live in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp.3-4.

26 Jim Wallis, Seven Ways to Change the World: Reviving Faith and Politics (Oxford: Lion, 2008), p.103.

27 See especially Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2007), pp.176-85.

28 Quoted in Jennifer Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.151-52, cf. p.129. See further Mark G. Brett, Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008), pp.132-52.

29 Albino Barrera, Economic Compulsion and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), pp.199-200; from a Jewish perspective see Sacks, Dignity, pp.105-124.

30 Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname, pp.79-80. The full transcript of the campesinos’ reading of Luke 19:1-10 is found on pp.76-81.

31 Australia is a major trafficking destination for forced prosti-tution. International Labor Office, ‘Forced Labour,’ p.58.

32 A fuller picture of the Malto Development Project (an integrated community development program facilitated by EFICOR and Friends Missionary Prayer Band) is provided in Deborah Storie, ‘Hope and Hardship in the Malto Development Project,’ TEAR Target, no. 4 (2005), pp.4-7. See further, www.eficor.org.

33 A range of other stories exploring the social ramifica-tions of development interventions are found in John Stackhouse, Out of Poverty and into Something More Comfortable, (Toronto: Random House, 2000). See also Wallis, Seven Ways to Change the World, p.166.

34 Borg, ‘Mission and the Groaning of Creation,’ Interna-tional Bulletin of Missionary Research 32, no. 4 (2008), pp.169-70.