Economics and Politics In Revelation

As I’ve wrestled with my own sin I’ve been thinking about a theme that runs throughout the Bible which seems woefully neglected in the Church today. While the Bible does certainly call individual to personally trust in God and leave their lives of sin, the Bible also and more repeatedly call the world to leave its political and economic structures and take up God’s kingdom ways of being. As I write this I’m increasingly unhappy with having to make such a distinction between personal sin and the political and economic structures of the world. This is because that I’m increasingly convinced that the ways we organize ourselves politically and economically, and I doubt the two are separable, help determine and shape how we go about our personal lives; that which we think and do.

With the interconnection between economics, politics, and the way we live out our social existence it becomes increasingly difficult to say what determines what. Does our personal rebellion against God determine our political and economic structures? Or do our economic and political structures determine our personal rebellion? I doubt that such a chicken or egg scenario can ever be untangled because the two work hand in hand. Personal rebellion shape and structures our economics and politics, and our politics and economics shapes, structure, and reinforces our persons and their rebellion in a never ending downward spiral. Thankfully a number of very gifted scholars are exploring the political and economic dimension of the Bible.

One of the finest and gifted commentators on the economic and political dimensions of the Bible in my opinon is Richard Bauckham. Time and time again his name comes up as the must read on Revelation. His book “How to Read the Bible Politically” strikes me as one that grasps some of the finer subtleties of the political and economic dimensions of the Bible very exceptionally.

In a talk Bauckham gave on Revelation at Criswell College http://www.criswell.edu/sermon/richard-bauckham/ he captures something of the connection between politics, economics, and the way we live in the world when he says:

Revelation liberates its readers from the dominate worldview, the Roman view of the world in the first century. It exposes the idolatry that from top to bottom infuses and inspires the political, economic, and social realities in which its readers live and it calls them to uncompromising Christian witness to the true God who despite earthly appearances is sovereign over the world. So by seeing the world differently, by being given this fresh imaginative appreciation of what the world is like from God’s perspective, readers are enabled to live and die differently as followers of Jesus’ way of faithful witness to God even in the face of death. They’re empowered to live their allegiance to a different way of being in the world, to the kingdom of God, and to live in hope of the coming of God’s kingdom as the ultimate truth of this world which must prevail over everything that presently opposes God’s rule. (emphasis mine)

Here I believe that Bauckham has hit upon a central theme not only in Revelation but also through out the entire Bible which invites its hearers to reorient themselves around God rather than the world. This different way of seeing the world, as the above quote indicates, involves the totality of existence: the political, economic, and social ways of being in the world that we the Church must attend to if we are to be in any true sense Biblical. The reorientation brings with it personal reformation precisely because how we see things and how we organize ourselves politically, economically and socially are intimately interconnected.

This is important for the Church to grasp. One of the biggest critiques raised against the church here in the U.S. is that the church doesn’t look any different than the world. Divorce rates are the same, and most every day of the week some fallen church leader graces the headlines of the news. Sexual immorality runs rampant throughout the church, and opulent wealth is regularly touted as God’s desire for your life. This I suggest is because the Church here in the U.S. has so capitulated with the political and economic worldview of western liberalism that few are able to adequately distinguish between God’s kingdom and western liberalism. The two or either talked about as if they were one and the same, or they’re routinely ignored. This failure to distinguish between God’s kingdom and western liberalism (or any other alternative socio-political-economic system) has in turn affected at every level how the Church and its members exist in the world. The Church as a body must find new eyes and ears to see and hear the political and economic dimensions of Jesus call to repentance and faithfully begin to embody them if we as individuals hope to personally lead markedly different lives. If we don’t we will continue to see Christians desperately trying to swim against the stream of culture only to be swallowed up by its currents and dashed against the rocks. Let those with ears hear.

Yoder on the practice of prosboul

While reading through "The Politics of Jesus" by Yoder I found this particularly interesting:

“The frequent remission of debts had a serious inconvenience, already indicated in Deuteronomy 13:7-11: it froze credit. Because of this the rabbis, even the most orthodox like Hillel and Shammai, who had become the champions of the strict application of the law of Moses, hesitated to demand the strict application of the jubilee. The closer the sabbatical year came, the more the wealthy hesitated to lend to the poor for fear of losing their capital. Hereby the economic life of the country was paralyzed. The rabbis sought out a solution to this problem. Adroit commentators of the law, they knew how to make it say the opposite of what it ordered.

It was the most congenial among them, the famous Hillel, whom Jesus sometimes quoted, the grandfather of Gamaliel (who was to be in his turn the teacher of Paul), who found a neat solution to the problem.

This solution was called the prosboul. This word probably signifies: pros boule which is Greek for ‘an action formalized before the tribunal.’ According to the treatise Gittin of the Mishnas, Hillel in this way authorized a creditor to transfer to a court the right to recover in his name a debt which the sabbatical year otherwise might have canceled.

The very existence of the proboul proves that, contrary to the
statement of some authors, there was at the time of Jesus a strong current favoring the strict application of the provision of the jubilee for the periodic remission of debts. Otherwise the institution of this procedure of prosboul would have been unnecessary.” (64-65)

Faith and Politics

I've been working on my application to Princeton Theological Seminary and part of the application calls for some reflective essays. One of the questions asks the applicant to state, in a paragraph mind you, their hopes and concerns for the church and its mission. My response to the question was that I want to see the church become more political. Faith and politics have become a huge topic of conversation, both in the church, and in the larger culture, there are some ways of engaging politically by the church that I'm not too fond of, and there are some ways of engaging that I'm much more of a fan of, and some ways of engaging that I think need to be reflected in the Church both locally, nationally, and internationally.

When I look at the religious right, I see some engagement with the political system, I think this is a good thing. Its entirely proper that the Christian faith be represented in the political system. For the church to not engage with the world politically, it would be tantamount to denying that Christ is Lord over all of creation, that's not an option. However the right has largely concerned itself with just a small number of issues, largely relating to issues surrounding sexuality, hardly representative of the Bible as a whole.

This has led to the rise of guys like Jim Wallis, and Tony Campolo, who have looked to represent a much broader range of issues that the bible concerns itself with. I'm reading Wallis' book, "God's Politics" right now and for having just started it, I'm impressed with some of the thinking that Wallis is doing. I think he and the other Evangelical progressives are 100% correct in seeing that the Bible is concerned about social and economic justice. I would agree that the church needs to recapture it's prophetic voice declaring to the nations God's heart for the poor, the widow, the orphans, and the oppressed along with God's demands for righteousness in our lives as sexual beings.

While I agree with at least some of what's going on in the church engaging politically with the world, there are some important things that I don't see going on that have concerned me in this endeavor. First and foremost, can engaging politically be the work of just a few voices within the Church? When I think of the church and politics, I think first of the religious right, who have done a much better job of getting the churches on board with what they are doing. The right though seemed to be largely dominated by a few voices, the Pat Robertsons, James Dobsons, and John Hagees. On the progressive side I think of the voices of Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo. I would think that with such few voices representing the Church, on either side, the tendency for distortion is huge. I really want to see the entire Church, protestant, catholic, and orthodox, come together and work towards finding a unified voice that is representative of scripture as a whole.

My second concern, and probably my bigger concern, is that if the Church only engages the world politically by looking to influence and steer the government, how is the church any different than any other political lobby group? I don't think that the Church can just live in a nice neat bubble separated from the world, never looking to engage with the powers, but neither should the church's function in the world be relegated to just another political lobby group. Here I find myself identifying largely with guys like Stanely Hauerwas, and Michael Gorman who see the church as a separate polis, a separate city state, whose vocation it is to offer an alternative way of live, both personally, and politically. What would it look like then, if the church, instead of merely trying to lobby governments for 3rd world debt relief, took the lead and began to work at doing large scale 3rd world economic relief and development? I would imagine that here in the United States, and world wide, the Church could pull together a large amount of resources for doing some thing just like that.