Pastor John quotes from Daniel Bell’s paper: What is Wrong with Capitalism: The Problem with the Problem With Capitalism
The ages are not juxtaposed; they overlap (1 Cor. 10:11). God has given and continues to give here and now more than capitalism’s Christian proponents can see.
What is it that they fail to see? For one thing, the way that God has and continues to gather persons together into a body called the church where, by means of the divine things in our midst – Word and sacrament, catechesis, orders, and discipline, human desire is being healed of its capitalist distortions and set free to partake of a different economic ordering, one ruled not by scarcity and struggle, debt and death, but by a charitable logic of donation, gift, and perpetual generosity. They fail to discern the divine economy that is already taking form in our midst as persons enter into new economic relations, giving and receiving, exchanging, not according to the rhythm of capital’s axiomatic of production for the market but animated by the Spirit of faith, hope, and love. In more recognizably political and economic terms, this divine economy takes the form of what the Christian tradition identifies as the Works of Mercy.
I am aware that I cannot resist the forces of capitalism on my own. (Some will scoff at calling capitalism a “force”, since that is an automatic association with “America bashing”, which is all lumped into the “liberal conspiracy”. While I can assent to there being a “liberal conspiracy”, it is of an entirely different shape than that perceived by the reactionary and aggressive forces installed in our government right now.) The “conspiracy” envelops the whole apparatus, subsuming liberal and conservative thought alike. The “resisting” requires a larger questioning; a further and more radical envisionment of what it is God has in mind when the Kingdom Of God is brought to bear on our predicament. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light”.
Even if capitalism succeeds in reducing poverty, it is still wrong on account of its distortion of human desiring and human relations. As Alasdair MacIntyre has noted, “although Christian indictments of capitalism have justly focused attention upon the wrongs done to the poor and the exploited, Christianity has to view any social and economic order that treats being or becoming rich as highly desirable as doing wrong to those who must not only accept its goals, but succeed in achieving them. . . .Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to recognize.†Capitalism is wrong not simply because it fails to succor the impoverished, but also because where it succeeds it deforms and corrupts human desire into an insatiable drive for more.
This “distortion” of desire from its God-given home/goal, that of “the heart that is restless until it finds it rest in thee” , is only for the gathered people of God. This light can shine forth from that people, and illuminate the darkness that surrounds it, but the light is nurtured in continued, disciplined, intentional discipline AWAY from that which is offered by the world as “the way it is” and TOWARD that which is truth. I have a conviction that this MUST of neccessity include a radical attention to the reformation of our own desires; which is much like, as Gordon Cosby told me, a very real addiction that must be overcome, and is that which we are taught by various forces that puound these distortions of desire into us.
What has always attracted me to the LIfe Together as told by the history of the Church of ther Saviour is that their concept and claim for the church is equally determined to be a community of “recoverers” who need constant care and feeding to fund their efforts at resisting the “darkness” and naming it, and confronting our own inner resistances and arguments and rections to why we consent to remain separated from one another. As important is the end result and the constant attention to how this community of recovering cultural addicts are called to be a force for reconciliing the two sides of various divides whch separate us from “the least of these” and bring to us the recognition and discovery of difference which is a key source of God’s gift of reconciliation announced to us by the coming of the Christ into the world.