God's Economics

I have found Ched Myers work on Sabbath Economics very helpful. These are links to his websites:

Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries

bcm-net.org/

Thanks for raising another timely issue for discussion.

I have found Ched Myers work on Sabbath Economics very helpful. These are links to his websites:

Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries

bcm-net.org/

Thanks for raising another timely issue for discussion.

I have also found Ched Myers' work to be extremely helpful, ever since my first workshop on Money and Discipleship with him in the late '90's.  He has MANY downloadable resources on his website and is beginning to offer monthly webinars on various topics as well.ChedMyers.org

I am also part of the teaching team for Organizing in the Biocommons for Lutherans, where we are looking at the three traditional modes of production: land, labor and capital, and exploring theological connections, and imagining creative and life-giving uses and expressions of all of these.

We'll be offering another class starting in the fall.  In the mean time, the readings for the classes are posted on the Leaven Project website  Organizing in the Biocommons Readings | Leaven Project

Most importantly, I also have two boys under seven.  I'm thinking about the exact same things.

First, a huge thanks to you, Travis, for opening this discussion.  It opens so many doors that I scarcely know where to begin  in adding any additional thoughts.  I've been deeply formed by the work and thought of two people:  Joseph Sittler (the 2000 anthology of his work, titled Evocations of  Grace, begs reading and re-reading as a foundation for understanding our life in the creation of the God of grace) and Wendell Berry (The Gift of Good Land, What Are People For?, etc.) .    Those thinkers and a host of others over the years culminated in what became the capstone of my seminary work, a very long paper for my Christian Ethics class.  The title?  "Energy, Ethics and Justice--the Gospel on the Cutting Edge."  We modern humans have become enormous consumers of energy, whether in growing food, finding entertainement, doing church, making peace or making war.  Engergy concerns underlie everything we do.  And those concerns point directly back to our relationship to God and God's creation. To paraphrase Sittler just a bit while cutting to the chase, the grace of God is not an abstraction delivered by some theological ethernet.  Creation is God's delivery system for  grace.   It happens in creation, not apart from it.   

All of which led me to change my terminology a bit some years ago.  I no longer speak of "the environment".  I now think of and speak of "God's life support system".  That's a theological statement describing: 1) whose creation it is, 2) what it does, and 3) how it all works.  The more we live in a completely manufactured world, the more we seem to be removed from understanding the whole of God's life support system.  But then these questions:  1) What life is there apart from God's life support system?  2) What economy is there apart from it?  3) What justice is there apart from it?

Here's what we Christians need to confront daily as we go about our vocations.  As custodians of the doctrine of creation, why is it that our actions bespeak such low regard for it?  I say this as a former farm kid who looks at his Nebraska roots in agriculture and an agricultural way of life that has been, in much less than a lifetime, completely replaced by an industrial process I call "intentive chemical/genetic monoculture".   To me, it offers about as much promise for a rosy outcome as the once unrestricted use of DDT.  Ditto for fracking half the earth's crust in search of cheap natural gas as though groundwater did not matter and fresh water were 99% of the supply on earth. 

To simply begin with the word "economy" itself is helpful.  Its roots are two Greek words:  OIKOS and NOMOS.--the household rules.  Economies can only work if they work like households.  They must care for and nuture their young in order to produce the next generation of human beings.  Housholds must exist in cooperative and supportive relationships with other households, not at the expense or destruction of other households.  Households must by definition give birth and berth to the future by being mindful and self-regulating in the present.  For all actions, we must ask, "At what cost and to whom?"  But only after we have asked and answered Wendell Berry's question "What are people for"? 

As someone whose entire ministry is among people whose lives have been shaped by poverty, mental illness, crime, and the effects of a society operating outside the bounds of the OIKONOMOS, I appreciated the TED talk enormously.  Since my wife works in special ed in a primary school in one of Multnomah County's high poverty areas, I see absolutely no end to the causes of poverty mental illness and homelessness.  Our schools everywhere are filled with youngsters I see as HIT's (homeless-in-training).  Our help is not in the name of a technological revolution or the outcome of the next election.  Our help is in the name of the LORD who made heaven and earth and who gave us Christ the Redeemer of all here in God's life support system.  And so we begin by redeeming and rebuilding it, one household at a time.   That's what life is for.  That's what church is for.  That's what we are for.