Introduction

This is a theological essay about economic power. Economics, the ordering of

God’s household, has always been a central theological concern. As Douglas Meeks
demonstrates, ‘Economist’ is an appropriate biblical metaphor for God, as “biblical
God language is fundamentally economic.”1 The biblical God is forever concerned
about God’s household arrangements, the oikonomos tou theou. Economics at its
most basic is the study of household arrangements, whether it be the arrangements of
the extended familial household, the wider local community, or the national and
global households which we find ourselves members of today. Both economics and
theology contend for the meaning of the redemption of the household.2

The work of Walter Wink provides an interesting and illuminating paradigm

for considering the theology of economic power. Writing in the eighties and early
nineties, Wink was the first modern theologian and biblical scholar to undertake a
serious exegesis and interpretation of the New Testament ‘Principalities and Powers’.
What he discovered was a compelling and insightful perspective on the structure and
spirituality of institutional power. Wink laments on the one side those who have
understood ‘the Powers’ either as ‘demons in the air’, with no earthly institutional
grounding, and those on the other side who have identified the Powers ‘without
remainder’ as institutions, structures and systems:

“In the biblical view [the Powers] are both visible and invisible, earthly and
heavenly, spiritual and institutional. The Powers possess an outer, physical
manifestation (buildings, portfolios, personnel, trucks, fax machines) and an inner
spirituality, or corporate culture, or collective personality. The Powers are the
simultaneity of an outer, visible structure and an inner, spiritual reality. The Powers,
properly speaking, are not just the spirituality of institutions, but their outer
manifestations as well.”3

The ancient worldview, reflected in the Bible, sees every earthy nation as
having a heavenly counterpart. For instance, the angel in Daniel’s vision was
detained by “the prince of the Persian kingdom”, whom Daniel then equates with “the
king of Persia” (Dan. 10.13). It is not that the ‘prince’ is a sort of disembodied
‘guardian angel’ of Persia. Rather, the prince and the kingdom are both Persia, in its
heavenly and earthly manifestations. This worldview holds together both the physical
and spiritual aspects of existence, affirming the validity of each. It is distinguishable
from the opposing dualisms of Gnosticism and Materialism, which both sharply
divide the spiritual and the material, locating ‘reality’ either in the former
(Gnosticism) or in the latter (Materialism). Christian theology has tended to react to
the all-embracing materialism of modernity by conceding the material realm to
secular science, whilst inventing a “hermetically sealed” spiritual realm, safely hidden
from the probing of materialistic science, and has limited theological investigation to
this realm alone.
Neither Gnosticism nor Materialism, nor indeed the modern ‘theological’
solution will suffice. To get to grips with the biblical material, Wink suggests, we
need an ‘integral’ worldview – one that recognises both the inner spiritual realities of
things, while at the same time seeing this ‘withinness’ as inextricably related to their
outer physical manifestations. What the biblical authors experienced and called
‘Principalities and Powers’, argues Wink, was in fact real. “They were discerning the
actual spirituality at the centre of the political, economic, and cultural institutions of
their day… Institutions have an actual spiritual ethos, and we neglect this aspect of
institutional life to our peril.”4 Many Christians (and Jews) in the first century
perceived in the Roman Empire a demonic spirituality that they called Satan. But
they encountered this spirit in the institutional forms of Roman life: legions,
governors, crucifixions, taxation, etc. That spirit was the spirituality at the heart of
the Roman Empire, understood in the ancient worldview to be a spiritual being,
residing in heaven and representing Rome in the heavenly council. The worldview is
alien to most modern Westerners, and it is easier for us to grasp the truth that the
ancients were pointing to by formulating it in the integral worldview, whereby
‘Powers’ are the profound inward realities of institutions.
But are the Powers intrinsically malevolent? The tendency to identify them
with demons suggests they are, but at the same time they are a part of God’s good
Creation, created by Him, through Him and for Him (Col 1.16). What we must hold
together in our minds when contemplating the Powers, suggests Wink, is the same
threefold structure that we apply to human beings, and the cosmos as a whole:

The Powers are good.

The Powers are fallen.
The Powers must be redeemed.5

The Powers are not just evil, they are created by God to provide ways for
human beings to live together in justice and peace. Earthly institutions are vital for
the continuation of human life as we know it, precisely because “it is not good that
man should be alone” (Gen 2.18). But the Powers are not just good, they are also
caught up in the profound reality that we experience as fallen-ness, whereby humans,
institutions, and the world as a whole constantly fall short of the fullness of life
intended for us by the God of life. At the heart of this fallenness is an idolatry of
power, wealth, and domination that distorts human life, socially and institutionally,
often in quite wicked ways. But this state of fallenness must also be recognised as a
distortion, a state of being that is alien to our intrinsic nature (which is created good –
Gen 1.27; 31), both as individuals and as institutions. We experience this state of
idolatry as a slavery that, in our own strength, we are quite helpless to break free
from, and from which we need to be redeemed (Rom. 7.14-25). The Powers need
redemption too, and for the same reason that humans need redemption: they were
created in, through, and for the good and humanizing purposes of God in Christ
Jesus. We must engage the Powers, therefore, in order to see them transformed into
the life-giving institutions they were made to be.

The Simultaneity of creation, fall, and redemption means that God at one and the
same time upholds a given political or economic system, since some such system is
required to support human life; condemns that system insofar as it is destructive of
full human actualisation; and presses for its transformation into a more humane
order. Conservatives stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers the third.
The Christian is expected to hold together all three.6

So what exactly is this state of fallenness? From what do humans,

governments, universities and businesses need liberation? It is the system of
domination that characterises the modern world, but whose roots are quite ancient.
The Babylonian creation epic is one of the clearest reflections and religious
justifications for this system. In this myth, creation is an act of violence. The
children of Apsu, the gods, kill their Father pre-emptively and so their mother,
Tiamat, plots revenge. Marduk, the youngest god, slays his mother in an epic battle,
for which he demands chief and undisputed power in the assembly of the gods.
Marduk uses Tiamat’s dead body to create the cosmos, and so the foundation of the
world is an act of violence. Order is established by means of disorder. Chaos
(symbolised by Tiamat) is prior to order (represented by Marduk, high god of
Babylon). Evil precedes good. The gods themselves are violent:

Religion exists to legitimate power and privilege. Life is combat. Any form of order
is preferable to chaos, according to this myth. Ours is neither a perfect nor perfectible
world; it is theatre of perpetual conflict in which the prize goes to the strong. Peace
through war, security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from
this ancient historical religion, and they form the solid bedrock on which the
Domination System is founded in every society.7
This basic myth is still perpetuated, Wink maintains, in the cartoons that our
children read to the spy thrillers, westerns, cop shows, combat programmes, and other
oversimplified rubbish that fill the airwaves.
 The ‘Myth of Redemptive Violence’ is the story of the victory of order over
chaos by means of violence. It is the ideology of conquest, the original religion of the
status quo. The gods favour those who conquer. Conversely, whoever conquers must
have the favour of the gods. The common people exist to perpetuate the advantage
that the gods have conferred upon the king, the aristocracy, and the priesthood.
The Genesis creation myth, formulated by the Hebrews enslaved in Babylon,
is the very opposite of this violent tale. For the ancient Israelites creation is originally
peaceful. God creates a good world, not through violence or subduing chaos, but by
simply speaking. Chaos, evil and violence enter the world later, as a result of human
sin, not as a necessary precondition for life. As such, violence is a distortion – a
basically good reality is corrupted by the free actions of human beings. Violence is
no longer merely the way of things, but a problem requiring a solution.
The prophets understood this as they took a stand against the repressive
violence of people and kingdoms. ‘Be Holy because I am holy’ (Lev. 11.44) was a
call to a radical separation from the values of the ancient world. Israel were to be a
people who scorned the violent gods of the surrounding nations as idols of power,
invented by humans, and not representative of true divinity.
Jesus revealed definitively God’s domination-free order of nonviolent love.
His teaching was foreshadowed by the message of the prophets, that God is on the
side of the oppressed, and entirely opposed to violence and domination. Jesus
elevates the derided ‘feminine’ virtues of mutual responsibility, compassion,
gentleness and love, and showed extraordinary concern for the outcasts and
marginalised in society. The Jesus movement was a nonviolent movement of
compassion and equality. The Domination System, however, proved too strong even
for the church, and with the conversion of Constantine and the advent of
Christendom, the dream of Jesus became a nightmare. Christendom gave way to
more recent, secular totalitarianisms, in which the conquest of women went hand in
hand with the exploitation of the poor, the conquest of weaker nations, and the rape of
the environment.
There have been egalitarian resurgences throughout this dark era, such as the
Franciscans, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the civil rights movement and the
feminist movement. These groups all achieved progress, but none of them has been
able to overturn belief in the fundamental right of some to dominate others.

The major force of domination in the world today, I contend, is the global
economy or, more specifically, ‘the Market’ elevated to a transcendent position as the
arbiter of all goods and services. The Market posits economic growth and profit as
ends in themselves, forever increasing the concentration of wealth and power in the
hands of a tiny minority, while denying life and livelihood to those who, due to lack
of property, or incapacity to work, are excluded from the Market. Those who are
fortunate enough to have employment find themselves in a relationship of domination,
with employers forced to cut pay and lower standards in order to be ‘competitive’ in
the Market. The Market is essentially narcissistic and individualistic, pitting human
life against human life and reducing people to ‘consumers’, while destroying complex
traditions, cultures, bio-systems and, ultimately, the biosphere itself, in the endless
quest for accumulation and growth.
Markets are not intrinsically evil, of course. They are essential for any
developed nation that wishes to distribute goods. Any society that has developed
beyond subsistence level needs some means of exchanging commodities, and markets
have provided that means successfully for centuries, and viable alternatives are not
forthcoming. As Meeks points out, even Russian communism and Soviet satellites
couldn’t avoid trading in markets.8 However, the Market is fallen, and has
idolatrously set itself up in the holy of holies, presenting itself as the ultimate spiritual
good.
The spirituality of the contemporary global economy is the god Mammon.
Money becomes Mammon when it ceases to serve the common good, and becomes an
end in itself. Modern capitalism has made wealth the highest value. We are enslaved
to Mammon, and desperately need redemption, but Mammon fools us into willing our
slavery. Money offers itself as the ultimate liberator, but the acquisition of money
requires time, attention and devotion – Mastery of money turns out to be slavery of
Mammon.

The Kingdom of Mammon exercises constraint by invisible chains and drives its
slaves with invisible prods... But Mammon is wiser in its way than the dictator, for
money enslaves not through force but by love.9

What constitutes wealth? This is a key theological question, because it is

really asking: what takes the place of the value of values? That place is currently
taken by money, I contend, an idolatry that threatens the existence of life itself.
 Fallen

The central task of theology, as defined by Philip Goodchild, is the

determination of the value of values. It is precisely this role that money fulfils in the
modern world.1 Jesus’ ultimatum was radical – God or wealth (Matt. 6.24). Wealth is
personified as Mammon, a master who demands time, attention and devotion – the
very definition of worship. The service of Mammon is the essence of idolatry.
Mammon is all encompassing, demanding that all other values be subject to its
evaluation. For Mammon, nothing is beyond its reach; everything has a price, and
can be judged according to the transcendent value of money. As the Market
increasingly seeks to infiltrate every area of life, nothing is sacred any longer. All
goods – social, physical, spiritual – can be priced and recorded on the accountant’s
ledger, and those that can’t are discounted as worthless. Mammon is as totalitarian an
ideology as Maoism or Fascism.
The idolatry of the Market is destructive in three key areas: It destroys the
lives of other humans, perverts our relationship with nature, and alienates us from
God. In idolatry we erect walls which separate us from creation, from others, and
from God. 11
Historically, the idolatry of the Market as the supreme social value had its
roots not only in the industrial revolution, but in the ideology of property which
preceded it. The close of the fourteenth century saw the release of the serfs in Britain
and the beginning of the mass enclosure of the British Commons. With enclosure, a
new ideology of land took hold:

Land was no longer something people belonged to, but rather a commodity people
possessed. Land was reduced to a quantitative status and measured by its exchange
value. So, too, with people. Relationships were reorganized. Neighbours became
employees or contractors. Reciprocity was replaced with hourly wages. People sold
their time and labour where they used to share their toil. Human beings began to
view each other and everything around them in financial terms. Virtually everyone
and everything became negotiable and could be purchased at an appropriate price.12

English law codified this new right to exclusive private property without
social obligations. Property rights were then extended to patents, copyrights, and the
enforcement of private financial contracts. Property was now an absolute.
In the wake of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami developers grabbed land on the
beaches of Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Maldives, and Indonesia, expelling the indigenous
fishing populations who had lived there for centuries. Now, new luxury complexes,
highly profitable for the tourist industry, have grown up on many of these beaches,
while the impoverished tsunami survivors are detained in ‘temporary’ settlements,
barred from returning to the beaches. Those who did try to return were met by armed
guards, protecting the newly acquired property.
All private property must have arisen through land grabs, and conflict, because
once the Earth was the common property of all. Property rights are unjust because
property has always been obtained through conflict, at the expense of others.
Heinsohn and Steiger claim that the original property economy was
egalitarian, but the creditor-debtor mechanism within society brought forth
inequality. Debtors who could not repay their credits lost their land – their means of
subsistence – and had to go into debt bondage to pay off their loan, plus the added
interest. The creditors, on the other hand, continued to accumulate land and wealth.13
Property rights deny some the access to livelihood, while others use their
accumulated property to accumulate more for themselves. Those without property are
dependent and can easily be exploited, as indeed they are in the contemporary ‘free
trade’ economy:
“[F]ree trade profits from a reserve army of the unemployed who drive wages
down to subsistence levels in certain employment markets. Such free trade does not
facilitate economic growth for all but for the few, based on growing inequality. It
amounts to a liberalization of rent-seeking, monopoly, exploitation and usury.”14
Usury had been condemned by the Church precisely because it entailed exploitative
relations; turning the necessity of another into one’s own opportunity. Now these
exploitative relations are normative in the global Market.
Dominant Characteristics of the globalized capitalist economy include the
exploitation of workers, the exclusion of the poor by means of structural
unemployment, lower wages and worsening working conditions.
Alongside this, speculative finance, which produces no actual growth for the
economy, is booming, creating ever-expanding ‘bubbles’ of deregulated financial
capital which threaten to burst and destabilize the actual economy, as they did in
1929. But

Once the movement of capital is deregulated … then it is like a gas that has been let
out of a bottle. Capital cannot be restored without some stronger force of attraction
drawing back inward investment. Once capital has been liberated, it will be reluctant
to commit itself permanently to the economic fate of a particular nation and currency;
exchange in search of better prices and profits is the essential power of money. In
this respect, economic globalization is irreversible short of a breakdown in transport,
communications, banking or energy infrastructures. States that have released the
 movement of capital have little choice but to subordinate all other political aims to
the attraction of investment, or risk losing the source of their power.15
Nixon’s closing of the ‘gold window’ underpinning the dollar, and opening up
the New York Stock Exchange, has been the most significant example of financial
deregulation. The government’s gamble has released financial forces that it cannot
directly control.
“Aristotle was prescient here: the use of money to make money, money that
bears interest, or the quest for profits for their own sake, have no determinate value
and so no place within the polis. The condemnation of usury derives from this
principle. For money that makes money leads to the acquisition of a power that has
no political essence or limits.”16 The power of accumulated money threatens to
overpower all existing values, and thus dismantle the social order through
appropriation, substitution and exchange. Money is not simply an instrument of
exchange – it dissolves prior social order and replaces it with the social order of the
market.

Transnational corporations are a major player in the contemporary property

economy. Having outgrown their national borders, these institutions have immense
power. They have developed a system of global sourcing, through which they can
exploit the smallest price advantage in any country, so as to put a product on the
Market at the lowest possible cost, and beat their competitors. Their aim is to achieve
a monopoly, and when they have done so they can dictate prices in the Market,
playing unions, suppliers and governments off against each other in order to save on
wages, storage, taxes and environmental protection costs. “The single-minded aim of
these companies is to maximise profits on their ivested capital. Social and
environmental obligations are largely eliminated.”17 Transnational Corporations put
increased pressure on governments to lower taxes and increase subsidies, essentially
stealing money from the public purse. Business creates debt for nations, but gives
nothing back. Governments borrow from business, and raise taxes in order to pay the
interest. In effect, taxpaying wage earners pay subsidies to private business
The most profitable public services tend to be privatized, so the Corporations
can profit from them, while the state takes on the increasing burden of non-profitable
essential services, as well as clearing up the mess which privatized companies leave
behind, such as state pensions for workers in privatized companies. As big businesses
try their hardest to reduce the social obligation of property we get “privatized profits
and nationalized losses.”18

An even more worrying phenomena is the privatization of the environment

and elements basic to life, such as water, air pollution, and seed patenting.
 In 1980 the US supreme court, with a majority of one, declared that life is
patentable. Now, just ten multi-national corporations control 32 percent of the
world’s seed, manipulated and patented exclusively to these companies. The
manipulation of the seed’s genes often involves introducing ‘terminator genes’ into
the plant’s makeup, so that farmers cannot gather any seed for the next year, and are
locked into dependence upon these TNCs. Many farmers simply have to give up, and
this brings a massive threat to the food supply of two thirds of the world. The
biodiversity of entire regions is threatened by monocultural seed monopolies, and this
brings further instabilities in food production. The possessive Market economy is
death-bringing.
Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), introduced by the WTO,
have banned the production of imitation drugs in developing countries, raising the
cost of health provision in these countries “by a factor of between five and ten.”19

“Property gives rise to the modern conflict between liberty and equality,
freedom and just distribution. How can we protect the free will of individuals in a
way that does not preclude equality, that is, the equal access of all persons to what
they need for their lives and what they need to contribute to the lives of others?”2
Property promises us freedom, but threatens domination. However, we must
distinguish between two different senses of property. Property as access to life is
different from property as power to exclude others. The capitalist global economy is
built upon the second sense. Property is an exclusive right of an individual or
corporation (which is granted the legal status of a person in US law), who can dispose
of it at will. Property-ownership comes with no social obligations attached; property
is purely and only the business of the property owner. Because only exclusive rights
can be marketed, the Market relies on the exclusion of some. The right not to be
excluded cannot be marketed, so has been sidelined.
The Church Fathers were highly critical of exclusive property rights. “Didn’t
God make the earth in common for all?” asked Ambrose.21 In that case, agreed John
Chrysostom, “the root of accumulated wealth must be injustice.”22
Property as an exclusive right to both use and dispose of things is bound to
result in inequality of wealth and power. The wealthy property owners get wealthier
at the expense of the poor. Aristotle also understood that the limitless accumulation
of wealth created an illusion of immortality, and warned that in the pursuit of this
illusion the individual destroys community.23

The Market offers no project. Rather, it proclaims itself as the end of history.
“It offers nothing more, but makes a project for the entire future out of the misery of
the present.”24 This total Market requires a totalitarian political world power to
enforce the capitalist property economy in every corner of the world. The ‘war on
terror’ is this effort, with ‘terrorism’ defined loosely enough to include any resistance
to this imperial strategy.25
The Stock Market is the only measure of good. If the Stock Market rises, then
the war in Iraq must be a good thing. There is no other criteria.26 Klein demonstrates
how new, highly profitable private industries have been created out of the chaos in
Iraq, and the massive profits both Cheney and Rumsfeld made from their shares in
Halliburton and Gilead, by refusing to sell them whilst in office.27 Any pretence that
American political leaders are at all independent of big business interests has been
shattered by the brazenness of the Bush administration.

Market exchanges are supposedly egalitarian ones. Money is supposed to

dissolve oppressive social powers and leave equality in exchange. However, the party
with superior mobility can, in fact, act with progressively less restraint, and will profit
the most from transactions. The Market is supposedly benign because it merely acts
to produce in response to demands. However, demands are useless without money.
As is demonstrated by the current food crisis, it doesn’t matter how strong people’s
demands are, or how pressing their needs: if they are not supported by money then
they will be ineffective.28 There is a severe imbalance of power, then. A study by the
World Institute for Development Economics Research at United Nations University
reported that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year
2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. By
contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global
wealth.29 In terms of the effectivity of demands, then, the ability of a wealthy elite to
realise evermore complex and expensive demands is far greater than the ability of the
majority of the world to realise basic demands. The disparity is blatant and shocking.
Demands are both a demand for the realization of some good or service, and
also an expression of an evaluation. “To lack money, therefore, is like lacking the
opportunity to vote, to speak in public or to publish: it is to lack an opportunity to
offer one’s evaluations for acceptance as socially validated evaluations.”3

Mastery of money is always service of Mammon. Jesus saw this clearly, as

demonstrated in his teaching on taxation. “Whose portrait is this? And whose
inscription?” (Mark 12.16) The money that first-century Palestinians dealt in was
forged in Rome, and would return to Rome through taxation. “Hence if wealth was
acquired through the use of money, and money belonged to Caesar, then mastery over
wealth was at the same time service of Caesar. To accumulate wealth was to
participate in a system of exploitation and extortion.”31
 Philip Goodchild claims that “the absolute claim to private property, the
absolute precedence of self-interest and the absolute claim of the state to the
monopoly of violence all derive from the structure of absolution embodied in
money.”32 Absolution is essentially a religious matter, and the daily accumulation of
money expresses hope for this absolution from ongoing cares and demands. Money
promises salvation to the radical individual from societal obligations.
“The credit economy is a network of contracted servitude.”33 The one who
offers money, whether as a consumer or an employer, exercises power over the one to
whom money is offered. Money represents power, and we are willing to give our
lives to others in order to hold that sacred power in our hands.

In a peasant society, those in power see to it, by taxation, expropriation, debt, and
monopolistic control of prices, that the poor are never able to rise above their station.
In the modern economic system, the poor are kept compliant by the promise of
economic and social upward mobility, whereby individuals are able to rise above
their class without subjecting to criticism a system built on class inequality. In either
arrangement, brute economic control is given a mythological and ideological sanction
to guarantee that those who have most to lose from obedience to the ruling class
become its staunchest supporters.34

“The friction between biblical religion and any prevailing economics”, writes
Douglas Meeks “comes at the point of defining the household, at defining
economy.”35 The definition of economy has changed dramatically since the biblical
authors were writing, and especially since the industrial revolution and the advent of
the market society.
When the Market is elevated to the status of a god, then there is no area of life
that it cannot potentially determine. Even drinking water, clean air and health care
can be sold as commodities, claim the prophets of the Market. But the Market does
not distribute all social goods justly.

We must bear in mind that the Market is not reducible to the persons who
comprise it. It doesn’t matter whether or not the CEO and management of a
transnational corporation are greedy for profit or not; “the system is greedy on their
behalf.”36 Within the confines of the system an individual can make limited attempts
to be more humane – for instance, an employer can do his best to give staff a living
wage and comfortable working conditions. But he can’t raise salaries too sharply, as
he risks being put out of business by cheap imports and rising fuel costs. The system
is greedy on his behalf. It is not the CEOs and the TNCs that should be our major
target for reform, although we certainly can remind them of their social and
environmental responsibilities, but the system itself: “For we do not wrestle against
flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the
darkness of this age.” (Eph. 6.12)
Redeemable

“The real science of political economy, which has yet to be distinguished from
the bastard science, as medicine from witchcraft, and astronomy from
astrology, is that which teaches nations to desire and labour for the things
that lead to life: and which teaches them to scorn and destroy the things that
lead to destruction.” (John Ruskin, 1860)37

The imminent end of modernity requires a radical rethinking of political

economy on the part of governments, businesses, trade unions and churches
alike. Rapid climate change, overpopulation, and the depletion of natural
resources are set to come to a dramatic head sometime in the next three
decades.
Changes in the Earth’s climate have already begun, and many of the
processes under way, such as the melting of the ice caps and desertification,
are negative feedback loops that cannot be stopped. Dramatic changes in
temperature, triggered by man-made climate change, are inevitable, although
the exact shape of these changes, both globally and locally, is uncertain.38
The UK has been experiencing a spate of record-breaking weather, with
scorching Springtimes and soggy Summers39, and the Caribbean has been hit
with a succession of unusually intense cyclones. Meanwhile, higher than
average temperatures and low rainfall in water vulnerable areas are causing
drought, forest fires, and desertification.4 We cannot tell with any certainty
what the effects of rapid climate change will be over the next few decades.
Droughts, famines, floods, hurricanes and forest fires are likely, as is the
permanent flooding of low-lying countries and cities. Whether the global
temperature will soar or plummet, due to some as yet unknown mechanisms,
is less sure. “Prediction of the most basic conditions for continued human
existence becomes impossible.”41
Finite natural resources, combined with a burgeoning global
population, means that we are consuming more than the Earth can provide.
Since the 1980s we have been living beyond our ecological means. In 2007,
for instance, humanity used up about 30 percent more natural resources than nature
can regenerate in that same year, compared to 20 percent in 2002.42 We maintain this
overshoot by liquidating the planet’s natural resources. We cut down trees faster than
they re-grow, and catch fish at a rate faster than they repopulate. Mostly the effects of
overshoot are regional, as fertile soil, fresh water, and forests have limited
transportability. On a global scale, it will be the peaking of crude oil production that
causes the decisive collision between economic growth and ecological finitude.43
More oil has been produced than discovered in each of the past 30 years, and even the
most conservative of estimates predict the final peaking of oil production within three
decades, but it is likely to be far sooner.44 The problem is compounded by a booming
global population, with a corresponding demand for fossil fuels that is set to double
by 2035. “The collision between supply and demand must take place within a
decade.”45 Cheap, easily available oil has spurred on the population boom, and is
essential to the kind of industrial food production that has supported it. The advent of
Peak Oil will bring widespread famine, and a dramatic decrease in the global
population over the next 30 years.46 Tragedy may well be unavoidable.
Economic growth is clearly incompatible with ecological limits. Capitalism is
unsustainable. Capitalist investment, “guided by the maximization of profits, is
directed towards the maximization of rates of depletion. Such is the inevitable
contradiction of capitalism: it is necessarily self-destructive.”47

“What functions as God?”48 Is it the God who frees the slaves, oppressed and
the poor? Or is it the God of the Market?
The ‘God’ of the Market is absolute, monolithic, transcendent, independent
and impassable. He is the image of the ultimate property owner. Market
anthropology has replaced this transcendent God with the independent, property-
owning human being. The human is considered to be infinitely and irredeemably
desirous, a consumer by his very nature.49
As Douglas Meeks demonstrates, the doctrine of the Trinity provides a
critique of the Market’s metaphysical anthropology. Where Market ideology
imagines human beings in the image of an inscrutable, absolute Individual, the
experience of Christian revelation is that of the threefold God; the eternal communion
of Persons; the God who gives God’s self out of the fullness of God’s being, God’s
love. In God’s three-in-one being each Person is individual but there is no principal
of hierarchy or domination – they have all things in common, and give of themselves
freely. If we hold that humans are made in the image of this Trinitarian God, then we
affirm a radical critique of Market anthropology. Humans are not absolute
individuals, but are inescapably social. We are who we are in relationship with
others, and we cannot deny our common humanity.
The God of life unmasks and challenges the idols that legitimate power and
wealth, and call for human sacrifice.

The households of Pharoah and the households of Caesar, from which the
collective Judaeo-Christian consciousness emerged, were households of domination,
slavery, and death. “The Jewish and Christian ways of living in the ‘household of
God’ make them opposed to the definitions of economy given by Pharoah and
Caesar”5. The household of God was a household of freedom, as opposed to slavery,
of life as opposed to death, of the just distribution of the conditions of livelihood to
all, rather than the monopoly of land and wealth in the hands of an elite leadership.
The Torah forbade the charging of interest because it made people poor and
destroyed their means of livelihood. Often, the victims of interest would have to sell
themselves into slavery (Ex. 22.25; Deut 23.19-20; Lev. 25.35-38). The Law also
made provision for land-less residents, who were allowed to glean the left-over crop
at edge of the fields after harvest, and the hungry could enter the fields before harvest
to fill themselves (Lev. 19.9-10; Deut. 24.19-22; Deut. 23.24-25. Cf. also Matt. 12.1-
8).
What all these laws presuppose is that the right to the means of life supersedes
the right to land and produce.51 This is reinforced by the tithe law of Deut. 14.22-29,
which existed so that “the alien, the fatherless and the widow” could have access to
livelihood. Other laws that are concerned for the equality of class and wealth include
the injunctions on the Sabbath year and the Jubilee year, in which slaves are freed,
debts are cancelled, and land is redistributed. In these years the land is also allowed
to rest to regain its natural fertility. This law recognises the human race’s reliance
upon nature. Current industrial farming practices, which are doing untold damage to
soils and eco-systems, fail to recognise this, and are irreversibly damaging the habitats
we depend upon for survival.
Biblical prophets condemn the property-interest-seizure-debt slavery
mechanism as theft (cf. Micah 2.1-9; Isa. 1.23; 3.14; 5.8), and the law contains many
corrective mechanisms for returning lost land, livelihood, and liberty. These
economic reforms are without parallel in the ancient world. In Israel, the absoluteness
of property is rejected.
When Jesus laid out his devastating critique of wealth his disciples asked
“then who can be saved?” (Mark 10.26). The disciples had internalised the values of
the Domination System, which identifies wealth with blessedness. Jesus, informed by
the Deuternomistic and prophetic traditions, saw through this legitimization of
domination when he questioned the rich young ruler’s ethical credentials. Jesus
pointedly adds ‘do not defraud’ to ‘do not steal’ in his list of the commandments, a
hint that the man’s wealth is derived from oppressive structures. “One thing you
lack” Jesus informs him. Despite his protestations, the man hasn’t in fact kept the
whole law. Jesus’ solution for the young man – giving all he has to the poor – is not
an act of charity but of justice, repaying those he had defrauded with the help of
unjust economic mechanisms.
 In the kingdom of God, priority is given to the weakest – to the poor, the sick,
the disabled, the prostitutes, the tax collectors and the sinners. “God’s economy
begins with those who have been excluded from the household.”52 “The gospel of
Jesus champions economic equality, because economic inequalities are the basis of
domination.”53

A sense of scarcity is necessary for the possessive Market economy to

function. If everyone had access to what they needed then Market mechanisms would
fail to work. Exclusive private property creates an artificial scarcity by denying some
people what they need, and there remains a malignant fear that there is not enough to
go around. This system creates greedy fearful possessors, who horde up their
belongings and refuse to share. False needs along with false scarcities are created
everywhere as advertisers convince us that we need such-and-such a product. The
scarcities become less physical and more psychological, spiritual, sexual, as the
advertisers target our perceived insecurities and inadequacies, offering their product
as the solution to our lack.
How different this is to the reign of God: “You are already filled. Already you
are rich”, declares Paul (1 Cor. 4.8)! In God we are rich, and the realization of our
wealth frees us from the grasping possessiveness of the Market. “For you know the
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became
poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.” (2 Cor. 8.9)

The abundance of God’s love removes the scarcity we instil with our spiritualized
love of things.54

When we are freed from the fear of scarcity we are freed to be generous.
When we realise the abundance of God’s riches for us we have no need to horde. The
first Christians, living in this realization, shared everything in common, and no-one
was lacking among them (Acts 4.35).

The solutions to poverty, hunger, unemployment, wealth discrepancy,

depletion of natural resources and the destruction of the ecosphere all seem to
undermine the most sacred assumptions about property as an exclusive divine right.55
But if we claim that all human beings have an equal right to life (and we surely have
to), we must also concede that everyone requires access to the means by which they
can continue their life. This second right – the right of access to the means of
livelihood – is so self-evident, that the onus of proof is surely on those who would
defend the right of a few to deny others their livelihood.
 The elites continue to teach, contrary to all the evidence, that enough profit
eventually profits everyone. We must choose, claims Meeks, between wealth and
justice. We cannot have both.56

The alternative between capitalist private property and state ownership is

false, and must be resisted. ‘If there are only two choices, choose the third’, as the
proverb says. Life is fuller and more varied than the economic fundamentalisms often
imposed upon it. The bible doesn’t advocate any absolute system of ownership, but
starts from the perspective of God, who hears the cries of the oppressed, and the
creation (Rom 8.22-26). The basic character of property, then, whatever particular
form it takes, is its usefulness for the common good, the common good defined as the
welfare of the poorest members of society. In that context, the most compelling
system of property ownership has to be that of local cooperatives, which represent the
self-determination of the masses. Land is owned, not by a radical individual, but by
the local community. Each member has the right of usage, but no-one has the right of
dominium. All levels of economy must be reorganized from the perspective and
interest of local people. 57

Work needs to be democratized – Duchrow and Hinkelammert suggest a basic

income for all citizens would eliminate wage slavery, and give people the freedom of
flexible employment. This system eliminates the need for all other social benefits, so
it also has the benefit of downsizing a bloated bureaucracy.
Public services such as water, transport, communication, education, health,
and energy need to be provided affordably to all citizens.
Renewable energy technologies must be invested in and developed urgently,
both for small-scale, decentralized energy production, and nationally in the form of
large wind-towers and solar power.
The democratic international organizations – i.e. the UN and its economic
organizations – should be strengthened, while the WTO is weakened, or else
democratized.
The patenting of life forms and medical drugs must be reversed. Companies
cannot be allowed to sell costly AIDs and malaria drugs to countries suffering
pandemics. Governments, not corporations, should have control over the healing
forces of nature. The control of seed distribution must also be wrestled back from the
seed giants like Monsanto and given to the State, to enable all farmers to cultivate
their own seeds.

Alternative scales to GDP are vital for assessing the true success of
economies, scales that take into account the well-being of society as a whole, and the
poorest members in particular. The UNDP’s ‘Human Development Index (HDI) is
one such attempt, and there will be others. The crucial point is that social and
environmental factors must be included in any measure of economic success.

Part of the resistance to the ever-increasing influence of the Market in

all areas of life will be the conscious resistance of those who choose to defy
its pretensions of divinity. Local communities, who choose to organize their
trading and relationships independently of the global Market, are iconoclasts,
reminding us that money is not the true ‘value of values’, and that societal
bonds, relationships, work, leisure, art and love are cannot be evaluated by
their profitability. A refusal to consider life in terms of its functional
‘usefulness’ will go a long way toward liberating us from our captivity to
Mammon. ‘Time is money’ is a well-worn slogan, but its implications are
frightening. Humans beings are not cogs on some giant machine.58 The Sabbath was
instigated, during the Babylonian captivity, from precisely this intuition. The biblical
authors opposed the Babylonian creation myth not just because it pictured violence as
the primal reality – humans, in the myth, are created as slaves of the gods, with no
purpose other than toil and drudgery. The Sabbath, on the other hand, affirms our
humanity just as we are, without having to do anything or strive to be anyone. “What
is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?”59 The joy of leisure is
that it serves no useful purpose, and as such it is a protest against the Market, and its
joyless functionality.

In Latin America many popular movements are working to safeguard

against the worst effects of the rampant global Market. The privatization of the
water supply in Cochabamba, Bolivia by Bechtel in 1999, leading to a 35% price hike
and the outlawing of rainwater collection, was brought to an end by continuous
nonviolent protests in the city.6 Bolivia has, for the first time, elected a president
from the indigenous community, Evo Morales, who came to power on the
back of widespread popular political involvement. Morales has made bold
moves toward land reform and modest wealth redistribution – reforms that are
being vigorously opposed by the country’s wealthy right-wing elite, who are
attempting to form an autonomous region encompassing the wealthy eastern
province of Santa Cruz. These protesters, encouraged by US Ambassador
Philip Goldberg, have seized oil facilities and airports in the region, and are
apparently aggravating for US military intervention.61 Hugo Chavez, president
of Venezuela, has let it be known that Venezuelan troops will defend against
any such aggression.
 In Venezuela there are now a network of thousands of neighbourhood
councils and co-ops, dispersed at the grass roots and community level,
across the country. Chavez, a great supporter of the co-ops, has the support
of a large majority of ordinary Venezuelans, who managed to overturn the
2002 attempted coup, despite the support of the corporate media and US
backing.62 Argentina, Ecuador and Chile all have popular governments who
have come to power on an anti-neo-liberal platform. In Brazil, the Landless
Peoples Movement (MST), a collection of a million and a half farmers, have
formed hundreds of cooperatives to reclaim unused land. Argentinean
workers have resuscitated two hundred-odd bankrupt businesses by turning
them into democratically run cooperatives. The solutions to Latin American
poverty are coming from the bottom, from those who have been worst hit by
the reckless neo-liberalism of the last 30 years. These farmers, workers, and
trade unionists are taking the power for their lives into their own hands at last.
The cooperatives in Venezuela are taking full advantage of government
contracts, and are offered first refusal for running tollbooths, health clinics,
and highway maintenance. The communities who use the resources are the
ones with power to manage them.
The Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) is a South
American trade agreement, designed to give countries independence from
Washington’s financial organizations, and help each nation to develop in its
best interests. The agreement means that “each country provides what it is
best placed to produce, in return for what it most needs, independent of
global market prices”63. Bolivia provides cut-price gas and Venezuela offers
subsidized oil to poorer countries. Cuba sends thousands of doctors to
provide free health care all over the continent, subsidized by Venezuelan oil
money, while training Latin American doctors at its medical schools.

ALBA is essentially a barter system, in which countries decide for themselves

what any given commodity or service is worth, rather than letting traders in
New York, Chicago or London set the prices for them. That makes trade far
less vulnerable to the kind of sudden price fluctuations that devastated Latin
American economies in the recent past.64

Thanks to high oil prices, Venezuela has emerged as a major lender to

developing countries, lessening the power of the IMF and giving troubled economies
alternatives to their rigid neo-liberal Structural Adjustment Programmes. Many Latin
American countries are now free of the Fund’s influence, and its power is waning.
(cite New Statesman article on IMF) In just three years the IMF’s lending has shrunk
from $81 billion to $11.8 billion worldwide.65 The World Bank, similarly, has
significantly diminished influence in the developing World, especially Latin
America. Ecuador suspended all loans from the Bank in April 2007, while Bolivia
withdrew from its arbitration court, the body where multinationals prosecute
governments for acting in the interests of their citizens.
Of course, Latin America will by no means be immune to the imminent oil
shock that will mark the end of the fossil-fuel economy. Venezuela’s oil wealth has
been a major driving force behind Latin American economic developments.
However, the model of well organised, local co-ops, who take responsibility for the
provision of many services, including food and healthcare, alongside the regional
barter trade that enables mutual cooperation and provision of essential imports, is the
best existing paradigm for the necessary transition to a post-oil world.

Private financial institutions must also be tackled, as their immense power to

create debt money at will is further widening the gap between rich and poor, and
driving irresponsible financial speculation that threatens to crash the system. We
need the State to assume the power of creating debt-free money, which could be used
to lessen the State’s debt and to provide a basic income for the whole population. 66
Why should banks be able to create money at the stroke of a pen, increasing both the
property of the wealthy and the debt of the country?
Debt cancellation for developing countries is essential, as the only alternative
is escalating debt spirals which the governments will never be able to pay off, and will
reduce their ability to care for the poorest in their nations.
At a local level, barter exchange of goods and services without money or
interest is a healthy alternative the domination of the debt-money economy.

The so-called ‘anti-globalization’ movement (in fact, it is anti-corporate

domination) has become more vocal and better organized in recent years. The 1999
WTO talks in Seattle collapsed, due largely to large scale nonviolent protests in the
city, which spurred the leaders of developing nations to belligerence in the face of
pressure. The protestors were, in effect, reminding the assembled world leaders of the
words of Psalm 29: “Ascribe to Yahweh glory and strength”, remember the
humanizing purposes you were created for. The sheer size and success of the protest
served as a reminder to the world of how profoundly anti-democratic the talks were,
and how unpopular the WTO’s imperial project is. The major obstacle to the
organization and reach of the movement has been the monopoly of the corporate
media, who are unwilling to give voice to those who defy their masters, let alone give
them a fair hearing. With the advent of the internet, and the alternative independent
media, this is starting to change.

How should the Church engage economic Powers in the world? The charter
of the Church in its struggle with the Powers is set out in Ephesians 3.10: “His intent
was that now, through the Church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made
known to the Principalities and Powers in the heavenly realms”. It is the Church’s
role to reveal God’s wisdom – His humanising purposes – to the Powers, in the hope
of their redemption. Wink discusses Psalm 29.1-2, which calls upon the Powers to
praise God: “Ascribe to Yahweh, O heavenly beings, ascribe to Yahweh glory and
strength.”

It is all so clear. We are simply to proclaim to IBM and Gulf + Western and the current
political administration and the pettifogging bureaucrat that they do not exist as ends in
themselves, but for the humanizing purposes of God as revealed in Jesus.67

The Church is one of many groups who struggle to humanise the Powers.
Fortunately, as Matthew 25 makes clear, God is not dependent on the Church. Those
who are considered blessed by God are those who, regardless of religious affiliation,
behave in loving ways toward the hungry, homeless, naked and prisoners. (Matt.
25.34-40) “Apparently Jesus’ God is interested in one thing only: whether we behave
in a way consistent with the divine order that is coming. Our religious preferences,
practices, and affiliations are, next to that, a matter of indifference.”68

How do we oppose evil without becoming evil ourselves? How do we protest

the violent actions of Transnational corporations and governments without resorting
to violence? The key is to be found in Jesus’ teaching on nonviolent direct action in
the Sermon on the Mount. Turning the other cheek, giving cloak as well as coat, and
going the extra mile are not invitations to become doormats, as Walter Wink
demonstrates, but a creative ‘third way’ of resisting evil. None of the injunctions
should be understood as timeless and unchanging. Rather, they should be understood
as spontaneous and inventive responses to oppressive situations, designed to expose
the system of dominion for what it is. By stripping naked in front of a Roman soldier
who had demanded your coat (an accepted practice at the time), you can reveal the
unjust practice for what it is, and shame your adversary, without disobeying the letter
of the law. An armed revolution in first-century Palestine could only end in disaster,
as the events that culminated in the destruction of the temple in 70 AD would prove.
Jesus proposes not an armed revolution, but a social revolution.
Nonviolence involves courage and commitment, but it is the only way to
effectively engage the Powers. The myth of redemptive violence is just that – a
myth. Violence always begets more violence, and animosity only escalates.
Forgiveness, reconciliation, and a reminder of their God-given purposes, is the only
way to achieve redemption of the Powers.

The goal is not only our becoming free from the Powers, however, but freeing the
Powers; not only reconciling people to God despite the Powers, but reconciling the
Powers to God (Col. 1.20)

Local, popular movements are crucial. Communities need to take

responsibility for their own destinies, and not rely on detached national and
international bureaucracies and corporations to have their best interests at heart. In
this respect, the ‘transition towns’ initiative in the UK is heartening, as towns and
cities up and down the country start to envision a peak-oil world, and their place
within it. The nurturing of local, sustainable agriculture has got to be at the heart of
these projects; without cheap, easily available oil our whole approach to food must
change. While we can’t rely on the massive level of food imports that we currently
do, we also can’t rely on large-scale industrial domestic agriculture, which is also oil-
intensive, and polluting. A post-oil economy will employ many more farm workers
than the UK currently employs – roughly 1 percent of the British workforce is
involved in agriculture; figures for a peak oil world would be between 20 and 50
percent69. Local, small-scale agriculture avoids the monoculture and desertification
that result from the industrial overworking of the soil.

The Market economy is opposed to God’s economy as it leaves no room for

God’s grace or God’s justice. “The more the market logic threatens to become the
church’s way of organizing its life, the more the economy of the church is defined by
the prevailing economy of society and the more market rules determine what we mean
by justice.”7
There are certain social goods that should never be allowed to be subjected to
Market logic, including family relationships, healthcare, education, food, and
housing. That this list sounds a little quaint and unrealistic is a mark of how
pervasive the idolatry of the Market is in our society. But if we maintain that these
social goods are the right of each and every human being then we must prevent at all
costs their subjection to a system of unequal distribution based on wealth, leading to
domination.

What should be the role of the Church in this? The danger for much of the
Church, of course, is that it won’t even recognise the radical evil of the totalitarian
neo-liberal crusade. The Church has been complicit in Nazism and Apartheid in the
past, and these systems were even explicit about their aims. The Transnational
Corporations, the Commercial Banks, the IMF, World Bank and WTO are much less
honest. Their imperial strategy of domination is dressed up in the guise of ‘free
trade’, ‘choice’, and ‘development’. The negative effects of economic globalization,
if they are admitted, are called ‘collateral damage’, yet it is this ‘unintentional’ harm –
the necessary consequence of a totalitarian system based on exclusive private
property, unlimited wealth acquisition, and debt money – that is causing the deaths of
untold millions, and the steady destruction of our Biosphere.
The Church must begin by confessing her guilt and complicity in this system
of death. By listening to the victims of the Market, and turning to the Bible, the
Church can begin to grasp the depths of the evil of this system.
The Church must reject the idol of the global Market, and all religious
legitimizations of imperial power. She should turn again to the radical teachings of
Jesus on wealth, and the prophetic rants against extortion, until their implications are
deeply ingrained in her identity. It is not just the poor who need saving from the
global Market. There is a need for us in the Western Church also, who are the
wealthiest congregations in the world, to be liberated from our entrapment to
property, work and consumption that serve to oppress others.
Individually and corporately, Christians in the wealthy congregations of the
global North can take steps to rid themselves of the idolatry of Mammon by choosing
to live simple lives. “Simplicity gives us the perspective and the courage to stand
against greed, vengeance, and violence. Simplicity gives us the framework to
experience generosity, magnanimity, and shalom.”71
Churches can take many practical steps, as institutions, to choose the economy
of life over the economy of death. For example, churches should not involve
themselves in financial speculation, and should refuse to invest in banks that do.
Churches can invest in cooperative or alternative banks that invest in ecological and
social causes, and they can call upon their congregations to do the same. Public
announcement of these steps would cause a stir, and go a long way towards damaging
the reputation of speculative investments.
The Church also needs to put pressure on the State to fulfil its God-given
humanizing purposes. She can challenge the government to shift the tax burden away
from workers and onto businesses, to disallow the patenting of seeds and life forms,
and to resist the privatization of important public services, such as healthcare,
transport, education, and energy. She can also demand the increase of debt-free
public money, moves towards cooperative ownership at local and regional levels, and
the restructuring of the international monetary organizations into democratic
institutions.
Conclusion

There are incredible challenges ahead. The human race is about to experience,
collectively, the biggest single shock of its entire history. The accumulation of rapid
global climate change, overpopulation, local and global environmental degradation,
and the peaking of global oil production spell a disaster of epic proportions.
Droughts, famines, forest fires, desertification, wars fought over natural resources,
destruction of entire low-lying countries and the flooding of coastal cities are almost
inevitable. In fact, they are all already occurring. The globalized neo-liberal
economy can survive most of these catastrophes, as the wealthiest elite, with their
hyper-mobile capital are able to secure the stability and most of the resources they
need to sustain their luxurious lifestyles, and of course the systems of global debt and
free trade are not eliminated by floods or fires, or even mass starvation.
The peaking of oil, however, will change global economic relations in
profound ways. Countries, and local communities especially, will need to achieve a
far greater level of self-sufficiency than they have currently, and key to this will be
the local organization of agricultural cooperatives, as we have seen recently in
Venezuela and Bolivia, and the forging of strong local communities, undergirded by a
level of national and international cooperation. The Church, as a local, national, and
international organization, can be instrumental in supporting this transition.
While some Christians may await the destruction of the Earth and its people
with apocalyptic glee, it is not my opinion that we can legitimate the suffering of
millions of human beings in the name of the God of life. The god of Hal Lindsay and
the god of the ‘prosperity gospel’ is a Marduk, who legitimates the myth of
redemptive violence. Satan masquerades as an angel of light, and the god Mammon is
no different. Many Christians are complicit in the perpetuation of the death-giving
aspects of the global Market, as they were in Nazi Germany and Apartheid South
Africa.

If the church is already beholden to our economic, political, and cultural interests, can
it serve God’s liberation of the poor and dying in the world?72

The Church needs to find ways of living as the Church in the twenty-first
century. The Church should be the place where the economy of God, from whose
livelihood no-one is excluded, is lived out prophetically in the world, while waiting
for, campaigning for, and praying for the eschatological overflowing of that life-
giving economy to the whole world.
 We must not despair. Another World is possible, even if it doesn’t seem
likely. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, this much is
obvious. As a species, we are almost entirely unprepared for the tragedies that await
us. But the Christian hope is not a cheap optimism.

Optimism is the superficial view that everything's going to work out fine "because it
has to." That's not true, and in fact is a dangerous illusion. Hope, on the other hand, is
the confidence that there is ultimate meaning, even in loss, and that (from a Christian
point of view) everything works to the good in the fullness of time, even if it is only
given to us to know defeat and suffering in our place and time.73

Laissez-faire capitalism embodies this kind of optimism, and thus disregards

the crucial doctrine of the fall, and the necessary caution that must follow from it. In
contrast, the Christian gospel recognises the depth and disaster of sin and death, yet
still proclaims the victory of God in the midst of it. Our hope is in the death and
resurrection of Christ, not in inevitable progress. Things are getting worse, and will
get worse, but God’s purposes will prevail. That is the paradox of the Christian
gospel. That is our hope.
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2
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3
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4
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6
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7
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8
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9
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1
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11
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12
Rifkin, J., The Biotech Century, p. 40f, quoted in Duchrow, U. & Hinkelammert, F. J., Property for
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13
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People, Not for Profit (London: Zed Books, 2004), p. 7

14
Goodchild, P., Theology of Money, London: SCM, 2007, p. 144

15
Goodchild, P., Theology of Money (London: SCM, 2007), p. 62

16
Goodchild, P., Theology of Money (London: SCM, 2007), p. 64

17
Duchrow, U. & Hinkelammert, F. J., Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed Books, 2004),
p. 97

18
Duchrow, U. & Hinkelammert, F. J., Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed Books, 2004),
p. 95
19
Wörner, B., “Von Gen-Piraten und Patenten”, quoted in Duchrow, U. & Hinkelammert, F. J.,
Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed Books, 2004), p. 105

2
Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1989), p. 100

21
Quoted in Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1989), p. 106

22
Chrysostom, Epistolam I ad Timotheum, 12, 4, quoted at length in Ibid., p. 204 n. 17

23
Duchrow, U. & Hinkelammert, F. J., Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed Books, 2004),
p. 5

24
Duchrow & Hinkelammert, Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed, 2004), p. 123

25
Cf. Duchrow & Hinkelammert, Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed, 2004), chapter 5

26
Duchrow, U. & Hinkelammert, F. J., Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed Books, 2004),
p. 127

27
Klein, The Shock Doctrine (London: Penguin, 2008), chapter 15

28
Goodchild, P., Theology of Money (London: SCM, 2007), p. 100

29
“The World Distribution of Household Wealth”, 2008 UN-WIDER, available online at:
http://www.wider.unu.edu/publications/working-papers/discussion-papers/2008/en_GB/dp2008-03/

3
Goodchild, P., Theology of Money (London: SCM, 2007), p. 124

31
Goodchild, P., Theology of Money, London: SCM, 2007, pp. 204-5

32
Goodchild, P., Theology of Money, London: SCM, 2007, p. 164

33
Goodchild, P., Theology of Money (London: SCM, 2007), p. 239

34
Wink, W., Engaging The Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 1992), pp. 113-4

35
Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1989), p. 37

36
Wink, W., Engaging The Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 1992), p. 78

37
Quoted in ‘Are You Happy?’, a study by the new economics foundation (nef), and published on their
website: http://www.neweconomics.org/ (accessed 06/09/08)

38
Cf. National Research Council, Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises (National Academy
Press, 2002), available online at: http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309074347 (accessed
09/09/08)

39
Michael McCarthy, “Extreme conditions: What's happening to our weather?”, The
Independent, 28th August 2007
4
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment

41
Goodchild, P., Theology of Money (London: SCM, 2007), p. 49

42
Global Footprint Network: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?content=overshoot
(accessed 10/09/08), see also the National Academy of Sciences, ‘Tracking the Ecological Overshoot
of the Human Economy’, 2002, online at: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?
artid=123129

43
Goodchild, P., Theology of Money (London: SCM, 2007), p. 51. Cf. also David Strahan, The Last
Oil Shock (London: John Murray, 2007); Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over (Temple Lodge
Publishers, 2003)

44
Goodchild, P., Theology of Money (London: SCM, 2007), p. 51

45
Goodchild, P., Theology of Money (London: SCM, 2007), p. 52

46
Ross McLuney, ‘Population, Energy and Economic Growth’, in McKillop (ed.), The Final Energy
Crisis, p. 178, cited in Goodchild, P., Theology of Money (London: SCM, 2007), p. 52

47
Goodchild, P., Theology of Money (London: SCM, 2007), p. 84

48
Duchrow, U. & Hinkelammert, F. J., Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed Books, 2004),
p. 156

49
Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1989), p. 62

5
Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1989), p. 40

51
Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1989), p. 87

52
Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1989), p. 43

53
Wink, W., Engaging The Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 1992), p. 113

54
Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1989), p. 174

55
Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1989), p. 102

56
Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1989), p. 64

57
Duchrow, U. & Hinkelammert, F. J., Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed Books, 2004),
p. 170

58
Giles Fraser, “Humans are not just cogs in a vast machine”, Ekklesia 13/12/07

59
W. H. Davies, Leisure
6
Finnegan, W., ‘Leasing the Rain’, The New Yorker, 08/04/02, available online at:
http://www.waterobservatory.org/library.cfm?refID=33711

61
‘Bolivia ‘expels’ US Ambassador’, (Al Jazeera, 11/09/08):
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2008/09/20089110518745928.html; cf. also ‘The
Ambassador of Ethnic Cleansing’, (Machetera, 03/05/08):
http://machetera.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/the-ambassador-of-ethnic-cleansing/

62
Klein, N., The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 454

63
Emir Sader, quoted in Klein, N., The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London:
Penguin, 2008), p. 456

64
Klein, N., The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 456

65
Klein, N., The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 457

66
Duchrow, U. & Hinkelammert, F. J., Property for People, Not for Profit (London: Zed Books, 2004),
p. 190

67
Wink, W., Engaging The Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 1992), p. 167

68
Wink, W., Engaging The Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 1992), p. 168

69
http://www.economywatch.com/agriculture/country-wide/uk.html; Colin Tudge in Simms & Smith
(ed.), Do Good Lives Have to Cost The Earth? (London: Constable, 2008), p. 142

7
Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1989), p. 37

71
Foster, R., Money, Sex & Power (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), p. 87

72
Meeks, D. M., God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 1989), p. 24

73
Dreher, R., “Optimism versus hope” (06/08/07),
http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2007/08/optimism-versus-hope.html (accessed 11/09/08)