God’s Economy Starts At Home

The following is excerpted from New Monasticism: What It Has To Say To Today’s Church. The author, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (MDiv, Duke University Divinity School), is a leader of the New Monastic movement and cofounded the Rutba House community in Durham, North Carolina. An associate minister at St. John’s Baptist Church in Durham, he is also the coordinator of the School for Conversion, a partnership among New Monastic communities for alternative theological education. He is the author of To Baghdad and Beyond and Inhabiting the Church.

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The minute I start talking about Christianity and the economy, someone always asks whether I’m really just a communist in disguise, trying to use Jesus to argue for a new economic order. At the same time, someone else always worries that I’m using Jesus to justify advanced capitalism, as has been done so many times before. Because when we talk about the economy, whatever our convictions, we think we know the options. It’s either Karl Marx or Adam Smith - communism or capitalism. This is, of course, a spectrum, and there are options in between. But every economic system aims to answer the question: what is the best way to organize the relationship between people and their money?

The French sociologist and lay theologian Jacques Ellul summarized our normal way of thinking about money like this: “We look at the money question from its global perspective, and we try to solve the whole economic problem in order to solve, once and for all, the problem of money.” But the question of which system best organizes our relationship to money doesn’t seem very important to the Bible. Because the Bible is primarily concerned with our relationship to God. Sure, the Bible talks a lot about money. But it’s in the context of our relationship with the God who made us and everything else that is or ever will be. In the Lord’s Prayer we are not instructed to ask for the system that will best facilitate global economic relations. Instead, we ask God to provide today’s food and cancel our debts, even as we are canceling debts owed us. Instead of taking the global view, you might say God begins with us at home.

The word economy comes from two Greek words: oikos (house or home) and nomos (law or order). So the oikonomia is, literally, the order of the home. There’s nothing peculiarly Christian about that. It’s just how people thought about society in the ancient world. You might think of it this way: if a kingdom is a huge building where all kinds of people can live, the fundamental building blocks for this huge structure are homes. Households are the base units of the economy.

In the modern world, people who have wanted to significantly change the economic order have, for the most part, organized national revolutions. Some of these have been violent, like the communist revolution in China or the establishment of democratic capitalism in Central America. Some have also been nonviolent, like the defeat of the British imperial economy in India or the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. But all these revolutions have been movements to reorganize the national economic system, because that’s where we think change happens.

Any strategy to reorganize a system assumes a certain amount of control. And only those people who can imagine themselves in power set out to change the system. Democracy has taught us that people power can be just as effective as firepower. But whatever the case, power makes the difference in political revolutions. If only we can get enough power, we believe that we can set the world back on the right track.

This makes God’s economy seem strange. In our way of thinking, the God who is all-powerful should be able to effect greater change than any government or army or grassroots movement. But God doesn’t propose an economic system. The Creator doesn’t come down on the side of Karl Marx or Adam Smith. Instead, he gives a peculiar set of instructions to households.

After liberating a bunch of slaves from an oppressive economic order, God teaches them a new home order. Here’s how it worked: every day you went out to gather enough food for that day from the manna and quails that God provided. There was more than enough for everyone. But if you gathered more than you could eat, it would be eaten by maggots in the night. The next day you went out and God provided again. That was the new economy: each day, daily bread.

Every sixth day God said you could gather enough for two days and then take a break on the seventh. So on Friday night the maggots didn’t show up, and there was enough for everyone to eat their fill on Saturday. God’s manna in the desert was supposed to teach Israel an economics of providence that they would continue to live out even after they had their own vines and fig trees. Every seventh year, God said they could take a sabbatical - not to do that big project they hadn’t had time to do but to rest in God’s provision and celebrate the abundance of this economy. And on the fiftieth year, after seven times seven years, all debts were to be forgiven, all people set free from economic bondage, and all land returned to the households God had originally given it to.

Of course, this economy was part of a whole way of life in which God’s people were invited to live at peace with one another and their Maker. God did not propose the manna economy as a better system for ordering economic relations for all people. The Jews never debated the Philistines as to whether God’s economy was more efficient or productive than their economic system. The economy of daily bread and forgiven debt was, instead, a gift God’s people could receive and invite others into. They could put it into practice right where they were. In the no-man’s-land that no one owned or controlled, Israel learned to put food on the table and pay their bills by reliance on God’s goodness alone.

When it comes to the practice of economics, I think this is what new monastic communities have been learning: God is offering us the gift of an economy that we can start living right now, wherever we are. Spending time on the margins of society, we have seen the incredible divide between the haves and the have-nots. We know that economic injustice is at the heart of the disease that is crippling our communities. But we have opted not to put our hope in “compassionate conservatism” or a “New Society.” We haven’t joined the Communist Workers Party. We’re not waiting for the revolution. Instead, we’ve tried to follow the Spirit’s lead by reorganizing our households around the manna economy God has already given us.

Used by permission of Brazos, a division of Baker Publishing Group, copyright © 2008. All rights to this material are reserved. Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission from Baker Publishing Group.

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