[This, or roughly this, is what I said in a sermon I delivered at my church, Mosaic, on December 1st, 2007. For more on Mosaic, cf. http://themosaic.org/.]
About a week ago Don [the lead pastor at Mosaic] asked me if I would be interested in preaching tonight, as he and the other staff were going to be away on a retreat. Excited by the opportunity to speak I quickly agreed, and it wasn't until Wednesday when I realised that I had no clue what to speak about. Searching for a topic, I asked my wife, Mel, and she said that I should speak about joy. “After all,” she said, “we hear enough about how broken the world is, and how hard it is to follow Jesus. We need to hear is something about joy.” As soon as she said that, I knew she was onto something, and so I thought I would begin to explore the topic of joy.
Then, I also remembered that this Sunday is a the first Sunday of Advent and the beginning of the Christian year. You see, traditionally, Christianity followed a calendar that didn't run from January to December, but moved from Advent, through Christmas, then Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and so on. That means that, according to the Church calendar, tonight is New Year's Eve. And what do we do on New Year's Eve? We celebrate by looking back on past and remembering the good that has happened, and looking forward to the future and anticipating the good that has yet to happen.
So, as we think about joy, it is worth asking what do we, as Christians, celebrate?
First and foremost, we celebrate the 'good news' of Jesus Christ. But what is the good news that Jesus brings? Well, Jesus himself summarises this good news in Lk 4.18-19. He says:
The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and rcovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour, (i.e. the remission of debts).
Notice just how physical and concrete this good news is. We are accustomed to think that the good news (i.e. the 'gospel') of Christianity is all about what happens to our souls when we die, but Jesus seems to think that the good news is about what happens to us, and our bodies, here and now. Thus, it is good news for the poor, it is freedom for prisoners, it is healing for the sick, it is release for the oppressed, and it is the release from financial debts.
All of this is summarised in Jesus' proclamation of the forgiveness of sins.
You see, to be a sinner in Jesus' day didn't just mean that you had made some sort of moral mistake, or thought some sort of bad thought in your mind, or something like that. Being a sinner was related to one's social status. Thus, those who were considered 'sinners' were marginalised and excluded — they weren't invited to the same places and parties as the people who had everything together, and who were well respected in society. The 'sinners' were the people that everybody treated like scum. Thus, the attitude that most people in Vancouver have towards people in the downtown eastside would be an example of how people in Jesus' day treated people they considered 'sinners.' In Jesus' day, polite society would call people sinners and then refuse to have anything to do with those people; in our day, polite society calls people 'junkies' and 'whores' and then refuses to have anything to do with those people.
Yet, it is to precisely this sort of people that Jesus brought good news. And this is why 'forgiveness' has to do with every area of life. To be forgiven doesn't just mean that you get to live with God after you die, it also means that you get to live with God, and with one another, here and now. Consequently, Jesus doesn't just tell people that they are forgiven, he enacts their forgiveness. How did he do this? By treating them, not as scum, but as equals. Thus, Jesus eats with the outcasts, he parties with the marginalised, and he touches the untouchables — and by doing these things he freed them, healed them, and showed them that good news for the poor really is good news for the poor.
Now, what is especially wonderful about all of this is that Jesus actually forgave people before they had even repented. When we read the Gospels carefully, we notice that Jesus almost always forgives people who aren't asking for forgiveness. For example, in Mt 9, a paralysed person is brought to Jesus asking to be healed — but Jesus forgives his sins, something the paralysed person wasn't asking for (of course, Jesus also heals him after). What we learn from this is that God's love for us is so great that we are already forgiven before we even repent. Jesus shows us that God doesn't look down on us as sinners that he is waiting to damn — he shows us that God looks down on us with love, and is waiting to welcome us home.
This, then, reverses the standard Christian approach to evangelism (i.e. spreading the good news). Usually we hear something like this: “you need to repent so that you can be forgiven and escape God's anger” but really the message Jesus brings is this: “God loves you and you already are forgiven, so now you can repent.” It is God's unconditional prior offer of forgiveness that empowers us to repent. Otherwise, we don't repent because we are afraid that we won't be forgiven. We start to think, “this time what I've done is so awful that God won't forgive me,” or “maybe God forgave me the first ten times I did this, but I've done this so much now that he won't keep on forgiving me.” Yet, Jesus says that, in all these situations, before we repent we are forgiven. So we can turn and face these things without fear, we can repent and know we will not be rejected.
The story of the prodigal son in Lk 15 illustrates this point quite well. The son goes to his father, takes half his money, and then goes and blows it all on women, booze, and parties, until he is broke and forced to steal food from pigs in order to survive. Realising that maybe he could go back and be one of his father's servants, he plans out this big apology and heads own, rehearsing his big apology over and over again in his mind. But what happens? The father never stopped loving his son, but kept looking for him to come back. Thus, when the father saw the son returning, he ran out down the road to meet his son. Then, before the son even gets a chance to apologise, the father embraces him and welcomes him home. Jesus tells us that this is the same way that God treats us. Before we have even had a chance to say our elaborate apologies, he has already caught us up in a joyful embrace.
Now by bringing good news, and proclaiming forgiveness, Jesus also becomes the revelation of God for us, and God with us. Furthermore, because Jesus is bringing good news to the poor and the outcast, he reveals that God is with us, not only when we are good and doing everything well, but also when we are neither doing good nor doing well. It is incredible that, when God comes to earth, he doesn't spend much of his time with the rich, the well-to-do, the powerful politicians, or the moral religious leaders. Rather, he spends his time with the poor, the oppressed, and the 'sinners.' Not only does he spend his time with them, he also shares their fate. He comes poor, homeless, and oppressed — and is even, at the end of it, put to death because the religious and political leaders don't like what he is doing. Thus, Jesus is the revelation of God with those of us who are in the same situation today. Here is God in solidarity with all who are poor and all who are sinful.
Even more incredibly, Jesus' solidarity with us doesn't stop with his death. Indeed, in between his death and resurrection, Christians believe that Jesus descended into hell in order to set free all who were held captive there. This means that Jesus even shares the fate of those who are damned, and abandoned by God. As odd as it sounds, Jesus becomes the revelation of God with the godforsaken (note, then, his cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” [Mk 15.34]). Thus, this means that there is no one among us outside of the company and love of Jesus. No matter how awful we think we are, no matter how many times we feel we have damned ourselves to hell, and no matter how many times we have been told by others we are going there, Jesus is still with us, revealing that God still loves us.
Of course, Jesus didn't stay dead, nor did he stay in hell, but God raised him to new life, and thus we see that the love of God, revealed in Jesus, is a powerful love. It is a love that overcomes hell, death, and all the other religious and political powers that seek to take away our lives and our joy, by continuing to define us as 'sinners.'
This, then, is why the Christian New Year begins with Advent, with Jesus, God has begun to make everything new — you, me, and the rest of creation, and so we celebrate this by making Advent the start of a new year. We celebrate the good news of Jesus Christ, we celebrate the forgiveness of sins, we celebrate Jesus as Emmanuel, God-with-us, and we celebrate Jesus' victory over all things, which means we are, here and now, free from all things that oppress us.
The problem with this is that we don't seem to be free. We still suffer sickness. We are still imprisoned. We are still oppressed by religious and political powers. We are still in bondage and enslaved by things like addiction and debt.
So where does this leave us? First of all, it leaves us in a place of hope and joyful expectation. Although we are still sick, all our wounds will one day be healed. Although we are still oppressed, those who oppress us will one day be overthrown. Although we are still in bondage, we will one day be set free. Although we are still suffering, one day God will wipe all the tears from our eyes. Although we are still homeless, one day God will welcome us into the home he has prepared for us.
Secondly, this also means that we are free to offer liberation and forgiveness to one another. Remember how I said that Jesus didn't just tell people they were forgiven, but also enacted that forgiveness by treating others as equals and as those beloved by God? Well, we can do the same thing. Because Christ has already won the victory we can also embody forgiveness in the same way that Jesus embodied it. We can eat together, drink together, party together, and treat each other, not as sinners and as those who are damned, but as God's beloved and as equals.
So, in a moment, we will do a little eating, drinking, and partying together, by sharing in the body and blood of Christ. However, before we do that, I would like us to spend some time in prayer for healing, freedom and release to come here and now. If you are sick, if you are oppressed, if you are in bondage, if you feel as though you are damned, there is good news! Christ has set us free from these things, he will set us free from these things, and he can set us free from these things even now.
Let's pray.

For [Christ’s] sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as shit, in order that I may gain Christ.
~ Phil 3.8
For all of us have become like one who is unclean,
And all our righteous deeds are like bloody menstrual rags.
~ Is 64.6
She [i.e. Jerusalem, who represents the Southern Kingdom of Israel] lusted after lovers who were hung like donkeys and ejaculated like horses.
~ Ez 23.20.
Generally, when the topic of swearing is addressed by Christians, an appeal is made to certain passages that talk about controlling the tongue, avoiding cursing, and speaking only ‘wholesome’ words. Here are three examples:
But no one can tame the tongue; it is a restless evil and full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father; and with it we curse men, who have been made in the likeness of God; from the same mouth come both blessing and cursing, my brothers and sisters, these things ought not to be this way. (Ja 3.8-10).
Their [i.e. the unrighteous] throat is an open grave. With their tongues they keep deceiving, the poison of asps is under their lips; whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness (Ro 3.13-14).
Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, that it may give grace to those who hear (Eph 4.29).
From passages like these, the general conclusion that contemporary Christians draw is that all swearing, and all vulgar speech, should be thoroughly avoided and thoroughly condemned. Unfortunately, such a conclusion is drawn much too hastily and neglects the broader witness of Scripture (which is frequently watered-down by our modern English translations). When we read Scripture more carefully we notice that tensions arise because the biblical authors seem to be quite comfortable using ‘swear words’ and vulgar language to make their points at various times. Thus, Paul, who counsels against unwholesome language in Eph 4, isn’t afraid to describe everything else as “shit” compared to what he gains in Christ in Phil 3. Furthermore, Isaiah isn’t afraid to use language that was both vulgar and offensive, and Ezekiel, the most vulgar of all, is actually quoting the word of the Lord in the citation provided above. This means that even God uses rather foul language within Scripture! Indeed, Scripture as a witness to the word of God makes it clear that sometimes God doesn’t hesitate to swear and to use vulgar and offensive language.
So how are we to negotiate this tension in Scripture?
First, we need to be clear about the sort of swearing and cursing that Scripture condemns. Scripturally, cursing was understood in three ways (1) as taking God’s name in vain (e.g. “Jesus H. Christ!”); (2) as slandering others (e.g. “You’re a piece of shit!”); and (3) as wishing evil on others (e.g. “go to hell!”). Christians should never engage in any swearing or vulgar language that falls within these three categories — and it means that other words and other names that we use for people are just as wrong as our traditional ‘swear words.’
Secondly, apart from that threefold understanding of cursing, Scripture also shows us that there are times when it is both okay and appropriate to curse or use vulgar language. Indeed, at times cursing can be the best way to speak a word that is “good for edification according to the need of the moment” (Eph 4). A well-known example of this would be Tony Campolo’s famous talk about poverty statistics, wherein he concludes that the thing that troubles him the most is that “Christians just don’t give a shit.” Having personally heard him deliver that talk, I can confidently say that such a well placed ‘swear word’ did a fine job of both awakening and convicting his audience. I’ve also seen how a well placed ‘swear word’ can do a fine job of demonstrating empathy with those who are suffering. Sometimes, when people share their traumas with us, the most caring thing we can do is say, “Man, that’s fucked up” instead of brushing them aside with some throw-away remark about God being in control or whatever.
Ultimately, the most troubling aspect of the swearing debate is that not-swearing has become such a central marker of what it means to live Christianly in the public realm. Such a watered-down Christian public presence is devastating to both the Church and the world. Christians should be revealed in the public realm by the tangible ways in which they care for one another and for the disadvantaged, and not by the observation that they say ‘dang’ instead of ‘damn,’ ‘poo’ instead of ‘shit’ and ‘frig’ instead of ‘fuck.’ Indeed, when Christians publicly define themselves in this way, they have simply capitulated to a bourgeois morality, and middle-class sensibilities. It is that morality and those sensibilities which arbitrarily determine which words are allowable in public discourse, and it disallows a good many words, in part, to take away the voice from those (like the lower classes) who often have not had the opportunity to learn another language. Isaiah’s condemnation of the Jewish leaders, which is picked up and applied by Jesus to the religious leaders in his day, are just as applicable to us:
This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me. But in vain they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men (cf. Mt 15.1-9).
This means a few things. First of all, it means that we should be lot more comfortable around swearing and so-called vulgar language. When that is the only language that some people have learned, we should be open and receptive to hearing what they have to say in that language. After all, this comfort is also reflected in Scripture. Scripture records events wherein vulgar language used in ways that it condemns, but it doesn’t feel that it has to water things down in its presentation of those events (think, for example, of the advice given to king Rehoboam in 1 Ki 12.10 — we might miss it in our translations but the young men advise the king to tell the people that his little finger is bigger than his father’s penis!).
Secondly, that we can sometimes swear and use vulgar language does not simply mean that we are free to go around swearing like sailors, or engaging in any and every sort of vulgar talk. Our swearing and vulgar speech must be done in an edifying manner, just as the swearing and vulgar speech of the biblical authors (and of God!) is done in this way. Thus, for example, although I swear much more frequently around my ‘street-involved’ friends, I swear much less frequently around my ‘church’ friends. Sometimes it is worth picking your battles, and although God frequently doesn’t give a fuck about swearing, he does want us to be sensitive to our ‘weaker’ brothers and sisters (here, I can’t help but think that the advice Paul gives about eating food offered to idols is rather comparable to the issue of swearing [cf. Ro 14; 1 Cor 8]). Of course, even around our brothers and sisters, sometimes a well-placed swear word might be the best thing we have to offer.

V. Conclusion: A Community of Beggars, a Final Appeal
Prayer, Hauerwas argues, teaches Christians to know themselves as “creatures who beg,” not only from God, but also from one another, and so they can “never be at peace with a politics or economic arrangements built on the assumption that we are fundamentally not beggars.”[202] As beggars, Christians offer the world a glimpse of another political economy, premised upon dependence on the other. After all, as Johnson notes, “[a] steward may practice her craft without a church, but the beggar must have one.”[203]
Yet it is precisely this type of living that is repugnant to capitalism. As Adam Smith writes: “The fortunate and the proud wonder at the insolence of human wretchedness, that it should dare to present itself before them, and with the loathsome aspect of its misery presume to disturb the serenity of their happiness” and again, “nobody but a beggar chuses [sic] to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.”[204]
This paper, then, is perhaps best understood as an appeal made by one who is situated among beggars, and who, realizing his own dependence, is begging his brothers and sister in Christ to recover the Church and restore her political economics, so that the world can be made new.
____________
[202] Performing the Faith, 241.
[203] Johnson, 141; cf. 16, 22, 110-12, 197.
[204] The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), I.iii.2.1; An Inquiry in the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, I.ii.2.

IV.3 – Nonsensical Vulnerability: Faith, Dependence, and Cruciform Love
This way of living then requires the Church to confront the last unaddressed stronghold of neoclassicism: fear. Christians do not share, they do not share life together, and they do not share life together with the poor, because they are afraid and are far from trusting one another in any genuinely tangible way (let alone trusting the poor in any tangible way). However, the most frequent command in the bible is “Do not be afraid!”[189] Thus, the Church finds liberation from fear in faith, dependence, and cruciformity.
The faith of the Church must be understood both as ‘trust’ and as ‘faithfulness’. Faith-as-trust requires the Church to rely on God to be and do what God promises to be and do, and faith-as-faithfulness requires the Church to demonstrate that trust in her actions and her day to day existence.[190] Again, recalling the distinction between faith and belief mentioned above, the restoration of the Church’s embodied faith requires Christians to withdraw their active faith from the structures of neoclassicism in order to tangibly demonstrate faith in God.
However, simply stating that the Church must demonstrate its faith in God is not enough, for a Christian political economics requires Christians to demonstrate faith in one another lest the notion of ‘faith in God’ is subverted into a rhetorical support for the rugged individualism of neoclassicism (i.e. “I have faith in God, and only God!”). Here Brueggemann’s comments on the covenant are apropos:
[Covenant] bespeaks a readiness to receive life from the other, from God and neighbor, rather than from self. Whereas commoditization presents the self as the sufficient and principal actor, covenant hosts the other as the focus of well-being… At the heart of the matter, the contrast of commodity and covenant hinges on the reliability of the other.[191]
Therefore, Christians demonstrate their faith in God by exhibiting a tangible reliance upon one another in their political economics. Indeed, it is precisely in this dependence on the other that true liberation is found. Self-determination, within neoclassicism, always comes on the basis of a deeper dependency (to credit companies and so forth), learning to trust one’s brothers and sisters in Christ is the way to liberation.[192] True freedom is found in the form of risk-taking that is expressed in tangible reliance upon one another. This means that, for example, Christians that genuinely share life together and tangibly trust one another, are liberated from the need to hoard vast amounts of wealth for retirement, and that wealth can then be liberated to meet the present needs of the community (like the needs of the old who do not have an income).[193]
However, such faith and dependence, requires a willingness to embrace cruciformity. In a broken world, where Sin-and-Death still operate through the regnant powers, faith, hope, and risk-taking entail a willingness to embrace the suffering that comes when the Church confronts neoclassicism (recall the ways in which neoclassicism punishes the undisciplined). It is precisely this willingness to be conformed to the cross of Christ that is definitive of the Church’s love-inspired mission to the world.[194] Indeed, is the strength of the love expressed by the Church that enables her to overcome fear, for as 1 Jn 4.18 says, “there is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear.” If the Church continues to be disciplined by the fears inspired by neoclassicism, then that simply reveals the shallowness of her love both for God, and for her neighbours. Thus, as Michael J. Gorman argues, “Faith is cruciformity vis-à-vis God, while love is cruciformity vis-à-vis other people.”[195] He adds: “Cruciformity, in sum, is what Paul is all about, and what the communities of the Messiah that he founded and/or nurtured were also all about. Cruciformity is… the experience by which the church—at least according to Paul—stands or falls.”[196]
It is this willingness to suffer, rather than cause suffering, that sets the Church apart from the coveting divisive violence inherent to neoclassicism. While neoclassicism fractures society through competition, the Church worships a God of peace, lives peaceably, and loves even her enemies.[197] Moreover, the embrace of cruciformity reminds the Church that membership in the body of Christ is costly.[198] Simply put, we cannot join the Church and continue to pursue the same comforts, luxuries, priorities, and privileges of the society in which we find ourselves. For, as Bonhoeffer writes, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die… [Suffering] is the badge of true discipleship.”[199] This embrace of suffering not only distinguishes the Church from the more ‘conservative’ elements of neoclassicism, it also distinguishes the Church from the more ‘progressive’ elements which attempt to love without suffering.[200] Ultimately, however, cruciformity is the Church’s response to neoclassicism because, in her suffering, the Church bears the sins of neoclassicism in order to bear them away. Cruciformity (as suffering against suffering) becomes the embodiment of the Church’s proclamation of forgiveness and constitutes the offer of healing and new life to all who are held in the grip of neoclassicism.[201] The world will be made new when the Church, in tangible and economic ways, lays down her life for the world.
Therefore, the Church as the pilgrim people of God pursues a trajectory of nonsensical charity (sharing life together with the poor), and nonsensical vulnerability (faith, dependence, cruciformity) in order to embody a political economics that offers the world a genuine alternative to neoclassicism.
____________
[189] Cf. N. T. Wright, Following Jesus, 66. Wright adds: “The irony of this surprising command is that, though it’s what we all really want to hear, we have as much difficulty, if not more, in obeying this command than any other” (ibid.).
[190] On the necessity of these things in the Old Testament approach to economics cf. Christopher Wright, 96-98; Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 199, 468.
[191] Texts Under Negotiation, 54. Additionally, Bonhoeffer argues that “[i]t is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated” (Life Together, 90).
[192] Hence, Eagleton argues that “dependency is the condition of our freedom, not the infringement of it. Only those who feel supported can be secure enough to be free” (After Theory, 189); cf. Ellul, 168; Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 105.
[193] It is precisely this sort of hoarding that Jesus argues is a sign of paganism (cf. Mt 6.25-32/Lk 12.22-31) of foolishness (cf. Lk 12.13-21), and of behaviour that contradicts that which is required of his disciples (Lk 12.33).
[194] Cf. Ro 5.3; 6.3-8; 8.17-38; 1 Cor 4.9-16; 12.26; 13.5; 2 Cor 1.3-7; 4.7-18; 6.3-13; 7.4; 8.2; 11.18-33; Gal 2.19-20; 3.4; 5.11, 24; 6.12-14; Phil 1.7; 3.8, 10; 4.12-14; Col 1.24; 2.20; 3.3; 1 Thes 2.2, 14; 3.3-4, 2; 2 Thes 1.4-6.
[195] Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 176.
[196] Ibid., 371-72.
[197] On God as the God of peace cf. Ro 15.33; 16.20; 1 Cor 14.33; 2 Cor 13.11; Eph 2.14; Phil 4.9; Col 1.20; 1 Thes 5.23; 2 Thes 3.16. Paul also opens all of his letters with a wish for peace (cf. Ro 1.7; 1 Cor 1.3; 2 Cor 1.2; Gal 1.3; Eph 1.2; Phil 1.2; Col 1.2; 1 Thes 1.1; 2 Thes 1.2) and regularly exhorts his churches to be peaceful (cf. Ro 2.10; 3.17; 5.1; 8.6; 12.18; 14.17, 19; 15.12; 1 Cor 7.13; 2 Cor 13.11; Gal 5.22; Eph 2.15, 17; 4.3; 6.15, 23; Phil 4.7; Col 3.15; 1 Thes 5.13). Hence, his communities are defined by unity and the absence of divisions (cf. Ro 3.29-30; 12.4-5, 10, 16; 14.1-15; 1 Cor 1.10; 3; 6.1-11, 17; 8-10; 11.23-34; 12-14; Gal 3.26-29; 5.13-15; 6.2, 10; Eph 2.11-22; 4.1-6, 14-16, 31-32; 5.21; Col 3.8-15; 1 Thes 3.12; 4.9; 5.11-15; 2 Thes 2.3) and the love of enemies (cf. Ro 12.14-21; 1 Cor 4.12-13; 13.4-7; 2 Cor 6.4, 6; 11.19-20; Gal 5.20-22; Phil 4.5; Col 3.22-25; 1 Thes 5.15).
[198] A point that Jesus makes on several occasions (cf. Mt 10.16-39; 16.24-28/Mk 8.34-38/Lk 9.23-25; Lk 14.25-35).
[199] The Cost of Discipleship, 79-80; cf. 35-36, 42.
[200] Such a reduced form of love is the sort that one is encouraged to practice in social service work. It is also the target of a attack from Che Guevara: “The solidarity of all progressive forces of the world towards [the oppressed] is similar to the bitter irony of the plebeians coaxing on the gladiators in the Roman arena. It is not a matter of wishing success to the victim of aggression, but of sharing his fate; one must accompany him to his death or to victory… we should never give into the defeatist temptation of being the vanguard of a nation which yearns for freedom, but abhors the struggle it entails” (“Message to the Tricontinental” in Guerilla Warfare [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998], 164, 172).
[201] Cf. Sobrino, 149; Bell Jr., Liberation Theology After the End of History, 192-95; Gorman, 203; N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant, 87, 256; Following Jesus, 49, 51; The Crown and the Fire, 88, 126.

IV.2 – A Political Economics of Nonsensical Charity: Sharing Life Together with the Poor
Recovering a Christian political economics means recovering a sense of Christian peculiarity or oddity, which is nothing other than the recovery of the Church’s holiness.[168] For, just as the Holy God of the bible is the “original counter-intuitive economist,” so also the people set apart for God must practice a “counterintuitive economics.”[169] Consequently, a society that has been disciplined by neoclassicism will likely consider the political economics of the Church to be nonsense or madness, for as Adam Smith observes, a person must be “perfectly crazy” to not employ all resources in either “present enjoyments or future profits.”[170] However, because the Church is a society that has not been disciplined by neoclassicism, she will use her resources charitably by sharing, by sharing life together, and by sharing life together with the poor.
That the Church is to be a community of sharing is premised upon its affirmation of God as a gracious giver who has blessed us with a world of abundance. Therefore, contrary to the teachings of the ‘health and wealth’ gospel, a true theology of abundance leads one to hold one’s possessions extremely loosely. Affirming abundance does not lead to extravagant living, it leads to genuine charity (giving) and voluntary poverty (sharing).
Generally, one discovers this sort of sharing and giving within the Religious Orders of the Church, but it is important to realize that this distinction between the lifestyles of the Orders, and the lifestyles of the other members of the Church, only occurred after the rise of Christendom.[171] As Justo L. Gonzalez has definitively shown, the Church Fathers, prior to Constantine, were adamant in their affirmation that Christians should (1) hold all things in common; (2) never charge interest; and (3) give everything but one’s bare necessities to the poor (thus, he shows that the practices of the Church in Acts continue for a few centuries).[172] This approach, apart from being premised on God’s grace and abundance, was supported by at least two other central views. The first view was ecclesial, and related to the Church as a Koinonia, for Koinonia was a secular term that referred to a business partnership wherein all of one’s material goods were shared.[173] The second view was creational, and based upon the argument that, in the Creation narrative, there is no private property; rather, the goods of the world exist for the good of all and not for the private use (or collection) of some.[174] Further, the focus on giving away all that is superfluous leads several Fathers to conclude that it was the poor who rightfully owned the excess of the rich – any hoarded excess was said to be stolen from the poor.[175]
This, then, is the method of sharing that the contemporary Church must rediscover: the disparagement of money, the commonality of goods, and the giving of all that is superfluous to the poor. The essential thing is not the attitude that one has towards one’s possessions, it is what one does with those possessions that matters.[176] Thus, this approach to sharing must subordinate contemporary notions of “stewardship,” for the command is not to responsibly handle what one has but to share necessities within the Church, and to give the rest away.[177]
The commonality of goods that should exist within the Church leads to a further development of what it means to share life together as Christians. In order to truly live together as Christians, one must recover the notion of the Church as an alternative family, a “fictive kinship” that overrules, and subverts, the biological family unit.[178] Within the New Testament, Christians most frequently use sibling language to refer to one another, but siblings, within that culture, were expected to hold all things in common with one another as a tangible sign of commitment, cooperation, and solidarity.[179] Hence, current efforts to centre Christian values on the biological family are actually detrimental to a Christian political economics.[180] To focus on the (biological) family is to ignore the fact that the Church is the true family of those in Christ, and is to surrender the public realm to the neoclassical powers. This, then, should have repercussions for one’s daily living situation. Rather than focusing on living together as a (biological) family unit, Christians should begin to live together based upon their kinship with one another. Consequently, they should begin to explore ways of sharing communal housing. Furthermore, such living enables the tangible sharing of life’s necessities with one’s brothers and sisters in Christ.[181] This method of sharing life together then begins to counteract the consumption-accumulation of neoclassism as each (biological) family will need to consume far less by sharing with other (biological) families. Moreover, it will also begin to liberate Christians from bondage to neoclassicism through credit-debt. When Christians live together, and pool their resources, debt, rather than being a ‘necessary evil,’ can become, at the very least, quite limited and, at best, unnecessary.[182]
Finally, Christian sharing, rather than becoming a means of withdrawing from the world, must be missional, and should give preference to sharing life together with the poor. Christians are to go forth proclaiming the forgiveness of sins (i.e. the forgiveness of debts), and should, therefore, be seeking to help to liberate the poor from bondage to credit-debt and consumption-accumulation. Sharing life together with the poor requires a few things: first, it requires justice, so that the question is not how much to give to the poor, but when we will stop stealing from them.[183] Secondly, it requires solidarity which, over against popular notions of charity-as-aid, means not only giving, but self-giving.[184] Third, this then requires proximity for there can be no solidarity or genuine relationship with the poor without proximity.[185] Such a notion of solidarity-in-proximity, requires the members of the Church to invite the homeless poor into their homes.[186] Lastly, it should be noted that, within the bible, care for the poor is understood as the gauge of the state of society and of one’s relationship with God.[187] Regardless of how close one thinks one is to God, or how wonderful one thinks one’s Christian community is, if one is not sharing life together with the poor than one’s relationship with God is fundamentally fractured, and one’s community is fundamentally flawed.
Therefore, by sharing, by sharing life together, and by sharing life together with the poor, the Church offers a public social alternative to the society that neoclassicism creates. By building on the foundations of voluntary poverty (sharing) and genuine charity (giving), the Church is able to counter the neoclassical foundations of credit-debt and consumption-accumulation. Consequently, reading Bloch with Bonhoeffer, we can conclude that the Church “built on the communism of love” desires neither rich nor poor members, but lives with the knowledge that “[s]o long as we eat our bread together, we shall have sufficient even with the least.”[188]
____________
[168] Cf. Hauerwas and Willimon, 71, 93-94.
[169] Brueggemann, Mandate to Difference, 58; cf. Theology of the Old Testament, 68, 76.
[170] An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations, II.i.20. The truth of this (and of Friedman’s suggestion that such “crazy” people should not be granted freedom) is well illustrated in the reaction that Saint Francis received when he proposed an alternate Christian political economics in the midst the rising monetary economy of Europe in his day; Julian of Speyer’s observes: “[Francis’] acquaintances, seeing him entirely changed from his former state, thin and dirty, did not attribute this to supernatural grace, but rather to insanity” (“The Life of Saint Francis,” in The Saint, 374; cf. Thomas of Celano’s “The Life of Saint Francis,” in The Saint, 190-92).
[171] For reflections from the religious Orders on the topic of voluntary poverty cf. the Franscisan example found in “The Early Rule,” in The Saint, 64, 69-70, wherein the brothers are allowed to receive all alms but money which they are forbidden to even carry, and the Jesuit example found in “The Deliberation on Poverty” and “The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus” in Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, The Classics of Western Spirituality, ed. by George E. Ganss, S.J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 226-28; 305.
[172] Faith & Wealth: A History of Early Christian Ideas on the Origin, Significance, and Use of Money (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990). This was also the economic approach supported by Aquinas (cf. Cavanaugh, “The Unfreedom of the Free Market”).
[173] Consequently, the Church is not simply a spiritual fellowship, it must also be sustained by tangible material fellowship (cf. Gonzalez, 83).
[174] Cf. Gonzalez, 114-16. It is interesting to contrast early readings of the creation narrative with contemporary readings. Whereas contemporary Christians (who are generally writing out of a place of privilege) tend to focus on the creation narrative in order to affirm work as a part of the human vocation, the Church Fathers (who were generally writing out of a place of solidarity with the poor) focused on the creation story in order to affirm Sabbath and the commonality of all things. Christopher Wright argues that the Old Testament agrees with the Church Fathers, seeing the earth as a gift to all and so the right of any to own something is always subordinated to the right of all to use that which belongs to all (147-49).
[175] As implied above, usury was seen as one of the primary ways of engaging in that act of theft (cf. Gonzalez, 114-15, 175-78, 216). This, then, suggests that Christian appeals for ‘debt forgiveness’, although a step in the right direction, are still somewhat mistaken. Those appeals assume that it is the wealthy and powerful who need to forgive the poor of their debts. In reality it is the wealthy and the powerful who should be begging the poor for forgiveness, because it is they who drove the poor into debt in the first place. This is especially obvious in the debts held over nations in the two-thirds world, nations that had democratically elected governments overthrown by dictators supported by foreign governments and businesses. These dictators then frequently fled the scene, leaving their nations with debts they never wanted, but are now forced to pay. That we then speak of ‘forgiving’ these debts is simply an ongoing sign of our own arrogance and lack of penance (i.e. repentance requires us to refuse to acknowledge those debts as genuine, while we ask for forgiveness from those we have exploited).
[176] Jesus makes this point in Mt 6.19-24 – one’s accumulation of wealth reveals where one’s heart is, regardless of the type of “attitude” one claims to have fostered; cf. Wallis, The Call to Conversion, 61-62.
[177] This assault on contemporary notions of stewardship is implicit in Jesus’ call to those around him to give up their possessions (cf. Mt 6.19-21; Lk 12.13-34; 14.33; Mk 10.21/Mt 19.21/Lk 18.22-23). Primarily that surrender of possessions would entail the surrender of the land given to the Jews as stewards (cf. N. T. Wright, Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 1, Jesus and the Victory of God [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996], 403-404).
[178] On Jesus and the subversion of the biological family cf. Mk 3.31-35; Mt 12.46-50/Lk 8.19-20; Mt 10-29-39/Lk 14.26-27; Lk 11.27-28; Mt 8.21-22/Lk 9.59-60;Mt 19.29/Lk 18.29; N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 277-78, 299, 400-402; 430-32; The New Testament and the People of God, 448-49. On the language of Christians as “brothers and sisters” cf. Ro 12.9-10; 1 Thes 4.9-10; Heb 13.1; 1 Pe 1.22; 2.17; 3.8; 5.9; 2 Pe 1.7; Mt 18.15; 28.10; Lk 22.32; Jn 10.17-18; 21.23; Acts 1.15; 9.30; 10.23; 15.1, 3, 22, 32-33, 36, 40; 21.17; 28.15). And for the way in which this New Testament understanding builds on the Old Testament law, which emphasized society-as-kinship cf. Christopher Wright, 173.
[179] Cf. DeSilva, 59-60, 167, 170, 215.
[180] Cyprian of Carthage argues that giving preferential charity to one’s family is a sin (cf. Gonzalez, 126). Furthermore, those who sought membership within the early Franciscan movement were not able to give all they had to family members, but had to give their possessions to the poor, otherwise they were not permitted to join the movement (cf. Thomas of Celano’s, “The Life of Saint Francis,” in The Saint, 203). Note that such a conception of charity contradicts the assertions made by Gary S. Becker, who limits (utilitarian) charity almost entirely to the biological family (see above, n68).
[181] For example, three (biological) families, in one home, could all share one oven and one roof.
[182] For example, three (biological) families, sharing one home, could also share one credit card or be able to live with no credit card at all. Additionally, these families would be able to significantly reduce the amount of time spent paying a mortgage.
[183] Wallis, The Call to Conversion, 46; Gonzalez, 110, 189-90, et passim.
[184] Cf. Sobrino, 18.
[185] Cf. Wallis, The Call to Conversion, 51.
[186] This is one of the Works of Mercy, but it is also a component of the famous passage in Is 58. Such an invitation may (or, rather, should) come easier when one recalls the Christ is said to be in the poor, and whatever is done for the poor is done for Christ (cf. esp. Mt 25). Maurin summarises this well: “There are guest rooms in the homes of the rich but they are not for those who need them. And they are not for those who need them because those who need them are no longer considered as the Ambassadors of God” (Maurin, 8; cf. 10-11).
[187] Cf. Christopher Wright, 77, 96-97, 174.
[188] Bloch, 185; Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 59.

IV. On the Way to a Christian Political Economics
The final question remaining is “what does this look like?” This section begins to answer that question by exploring the Church as a pilgrim people defined by her attachment to ‘nonsensical’ charity, and ‘nonsensical’ vulnerability.
IV.1 – The Church as a Pilgrim People
When exploring the question of “what does this [a Christian political economics] look like?” it is important to recover the notion of the Church as the pilgrim people of God.[162] This means that the Church is constantly in motion – she is akin to Israel, moving through the wilderness toward the Promised Land. Consequently, when approaching the issue of political economics, rather than attempting to formulate, and then enact, a perfect model, the Church should approach this as the pursuit of a particular trajectory. This means that a Christian response to neoclassicism will be dynamic, not static, a “viator economics” practiced by those on The Way.[163] Consequently, rather than attempting to find universal solutions for all the problems related to neoclassicism (and thereby going nowhere because it seems impossible to find universal solutions to all these problems), the Church must begin by embodying particular solutions to particular problems with the hope that, as she journeys on The Way, further solutions, further actions, and the next step, will become clear. What Marcos says of the Zapatista movement is just as applicable to the Church: “We aren’t proposing a new world, but something preceding a new world: an antechamber.”[164]
This means that the validity and sensibility of Christian responses to neoclassicism come down to the lived life of the Church and the way in which she performs her faith.[165] Ultimately, what is important is not what the Church feels, or thinks (or even says) but what the Church does – and what the Church does will be discovered, deepened, and constantly expanded in a process of embodiment, enacting, and ad-libbing.[166] What follows, then, are some suggestions for this process, premised upon Maurin’s suggestion that “[t]he basis for a Christian economy is genuine charity and voluntary poverty.”[167]
____________
[162] A notion that became prominent after the Second Vatican Council (cf. “Lumen Gentium”, in The Documents of Vatican II, ed. by Walter M. Abbott, S.J. trans. by Very Rev. Msgr. Joseph Gallagher [New York: Guild Press, 1966], 78-85).
[163] Cf. Johnson, 5-6, 208-209, 215; N. T. Wright, The Crown and the Fire, 108. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari propose that an unceasing “nomadism” is necessary in order to escape from fascism (A Thousand Plateaus, 159).
[164] Marcos, 46.
[165] Cf. Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, 76-78; With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), 199-212; Lindbeck, 51, 65; Wallis, The Call to Conversion, 132; Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, trans. by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 7; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. by R. H. Fuller and Irmgard Booth (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1959), 54-55; N. T. Wright, New Tasks for a Renewed Church, 146.
[166] Cf. Christopher Wright, 167-68; Eagleton, After Theory, 146; Maurin, 180. Again, this parallels the suggestion of Deleuze, and Guattari, who argue that one must engage in a “schizophrenic” process of inventive connection in order to break free from the fascist powers (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 7, 15, 53).
[167] Maurin, 30.

III.3 – The Return to the Public and the Offer of Liberation
Having demonstrated how neoclassicism disciplines the public in order to conquer it, it remains to be shown how the Church returns to the public with the offer of liberation, presenting an alternative story and liturgy, and an alternative conception of space, time, discourse, and the body.
To begin with, the Church offers a counter-narrative to the stories told by neoclassicism. In the Church, the story told by Scripture becomes constitutive for how one lives one’s life. Scripture is read so that one can indwell it and, in one’s own life, continue the trajectory it establishes.[150] This means that events like the exodus, the Christ-event, and Pentecost, become the basis for how Christians approach issues like economics today.[151] Additionally, because Christians tell a different story, they also practice a different liturgy – a different way of telling their story in a formative manner.[152] This liturgy is then expressed in the regular, corporate worship, and prayer, of the Church.[153] In the act of corporate worship, the Church both speaks about, and demonstrates, an alternate world to the world of neoclassicism. In the act of prayer, the Church’s position under Christ’s sole lordship, and the identity of each individual Christian as a member of the body of Christ, is reaffirmed.
The alternative story of Christianity then leads, secondly, to an alternative conceptualization of space. Whereas neoclassicism conquers local space with branding and advertising, global space with globalization, and bodily space with computer technology, Christianity responds by creating open space, by pursuing catholicity and by recovering embodiment. To create open local spaces means that the Church must not capitulate to the temptation to be branded. This requires the removal of advertising from Christian institutions (churches, schools), from Christian publications (books, journals), and from Christian bodies (clothes, accessories). Ultimately, by purchasing name brand items, Christians are not only perpetuating the abuse of workers in the two-thirds world, they are also becoming walking advertisements for the narratives of neoclassicism. On a global level, the Church responds to the fiction of globalization, which obscures the very real segmentation of space, with the pursuit of catholicity, premised upon the recognition that the Church is a body composed of members in the West and members in the two-thirds world.[154] Catholicity means recognizing the very real experiences, and very real segmentation, of one’s brothers and sisters around the world. Hence, catholicity is found in “partisan support for the weak.”[155] Jefferson may have been right to observe that “merchants have no country,” but the Church also has no country and, rather than using the transcendence of nationality to pursue power and wealth (as merchants do), Christians use it to pursue justice for the poor and the good of all people. Finally, at the level of bodily space, Christians must reject the Gnostic myth inherent to computer technology, and reaffirm embodiment, materiality, and the inextricable link between the soul and the body that is powerfully expressed in the doctrine of resurrection.
Thirdly, over against the neoclassical abolition of time (i.e. it collapses all times into time-for-work), and the neoclassical conquest of the calendar and public festivals, the Church must offer a notion of time structured around Sabbath and the liturgy of the Church calendar. Over against neoclassicism’s rest-less society, the Church, confident of God’s abundant giving, understands Sabbath rest as the climactic experience of creation and thereby refuses to listen to the Pharaoh who constantly cries, “Make more bricks!”[156] The Sabbath is the primary expression of liturgical time, but the liturgy also forms an alternate calendar to the calendar found within neoclassicism (the Christian New Year, for example, begins at the start of Advent, not at the start of January). Consequently, the Church must recover her calendar, and in doing so, recover her own festivals (Pentecost Sunday, Christ the King Sunday, various feast days, and so on and so forth). Furthermore, Christians must find alternative ways of celebrating festivals that have been subverted by neoclassicism.[157] Ultimately, by reforming time in this way, Christians bear witness to an inaugurated eschatology, while simultaneously resisting neoclassicism’s consummated eschatology.
Fourthly, the Church must firmly reject the tightly controlled public discourse of neoclassicism, which limits talk about economics to particular types of knowledge (descriptive), particular types of language (mathematical), and places the discussion within particular boundaries (a distinct realm of science). Refusing to be silenced, the Church must continue to speak in such a way that demonstrates how knowledge of God, and the values related to that knowledge, are essential to economics. She will do this, not afraid to use the language of passion and relationality, holding that all areas of life are connected to one another, and refusing to maintain the Enlightenment myth that life can be fractured into distinct realms and areas of study.[158]
Finally, against the way in which neoclassicism fractures the public and reduces it to individuals under the rule of great economic Powers, this reformation process culminates in the recovery of the Church as a public body. This essentially public nature of the Church is especially revealed, and made possible, by the Sacraments and the Works of Mercy. This occurs, perhaps, most powerfully in the Eucharist, which is, as Cavanaugh says, “a literal re-membering of Christ’s body.”[159] The Eucharist comes as a gift, for all, and imaginatively reorients both space and time, as Christians partake of, and thereby become assimilated to, Christ’s broken body, within the realm of eschatological time. This means liberating the Eucharist from the disciplines of neoclassicism so that we can understand that solidarity with the crucified Christ requires solidarity with those who are ‘crucified’ today.[160] Another powerful means of recovering the Church is found in the sacrament of confession, penance, and absolution. Confession leads one into a process that transforms desire, forgiveness manifests God’s gracious abundance, and penance furthers the process by leading one into deeper solidarity with those one has wronged. Bell Jr. summarises this well: “If confession is about identifying the bonds that hold desire captive and repentance is a matter of severing those bonds, penance is the positive life-giving movement whereby desire learns to enter into non-possessive, non-proprietary, non-agonistic relations with others.”[161] Finally, it is in the Works of Mercy that the Church then goes forth and presents the offer of liberation, and the proclamation of forgiveness, to the world. By feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, harbouring the homeless, visiting the sick, ransoming the captives, and burying the dead (the corporal works), the Church manifests herself as a public body that has not yet been conquered by neoclassicism. Furthermore, by instructing the ignorant, counselling the doubtful, admonishing sinners, bearing wrongs patiently, forgiving offences willingly, comforting the afflicted, and praying for the living and the dead (the spiritual works), the Church undercuts the disciplines and the power of neoclassicism within the public realm.
____________
[150] Lindbeck’s comments on reading Scripture typologically are apropos: “Typology does not make scriptural contents into metaphors for extrascriptural realities, but the other way around. It does not suggest, as is often said in our day, that believers find their stories in the Bible, but rather that they make the story of the Bible their story… It is the text, so to speak, which absorbs the world, rather than the world the text” (118).
[151] Cf. Brueggemann, Mandate to Difference, 28-29, 65; Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 99-105.
[152] Cf. Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, 153, 156, 160; Lindbeck, 33-34; Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 12, 83; Bell Jr. Liberation Theology After the End of History, 93; Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, 128, 153.
[153] However, recalling McLuhan’s observations, Christians should be much more circumspect about incorporating modern technology into corporate worship. If “the medium is the message” then surely the medium we should be partaking of is the Eucharist (which is the body and blood of Christ) rather than modern video and computer technology.
[154] Cf. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 97-122; Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 65-66; The Church in the Power of the Holy Spirit, 174-76.
[155] Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Holy Spirit, 361.
[156] Cf. Brueggemann, Mandate to Difference, 42-46, 152-57, 183-85; Ex 5.
[157] Take Christmas, which was mentioned above. Rather than celebrating Christmas by consuming, spending, and feasting, it may be appropriate to celebrate Christmas – the time of the humiliation of God and the beginning of Christ’s road to the cross – by fasting, and maintaining times of silence to recognize the sacrifice being made (of course, times of great celebration would be quite appropriate on, for example, Resurrection Sunday, Pentecost Sunday, or Christ the King Sunday).
[158] For more on this point cf. Daniel Oudshoorn, “Speaking Christianly in the Midst of Babel: Christian living as the exegesis of the gospel proclamation after the end of history,” in Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice 14:1 (Feb 2006): 14-24.
[159] Torture and Eucharist, 229. Hence, although neoclassicism creates victims, the Eucharist produces witnesses (martyrs) (ibid., 206). Thus, one is not “politicizing” the Eucharist but “Eucharistizing” the world (ibid., 14).
[160] Cf. Tissa Balasuriya, The Eucharist and Human Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1979), 5, et passim. Balasuriya notes how the Church in Acts, Paul’s first letter to Corinth, the Didache, and several Church Fathers all connect participating in the Eucharist to solidarity with the poor.
[161] Liberation Theology After the End of History, 182; cf. 174-82. Thus, the Eucharist is primarily (but not solely) related to a public proclamation and manifestation of the reformation of imagination, and confession, absolution, and penance are primarily (but not solely) related to a public proclamation and manifestation of the reformation of desire.

III.2 – A New Reformation: Re-forming Desire and Imagination
In order to recover the Church as polis it is necessary to recover the Church as a disciplined community. Yet it is precisely this aspect of the Church that is assaulted by neoclassicism, for the local church has become integrated into a consumer market and, rather than attending a church that disciplines one’s desire and imagination, one is more likely to attend a church that panders to the desire that one already possesses.[139] This means that it is necessary to begin to relate to the Church as a community that provides us with the disciplines that we need in order to live Christianly. As Hauerwas says: “I do not want to be ‘accepted’ or ‘understood.’ I want to be a part of a community with the habits and practices that will make me do what I would otherwise not choose to do and then to learn to like what I have been force to do.”[140] In particular, the Church must practices disciplines that counter the disciplines imposed by neoclassicism, in order to liberate the body from the repression imposed by the soul.[141] This means inciting a new reformation – the reformation of desire and imagination.
The Church must begin by reforming desire and restoring it to its true place and its true end.[142] This means that, whereas neoclassicism disciplines desire by rooting it in lack and greed, and aligning it with entitlement, the Church must liberate desire by rooting it in productivity, passion, and grateful creativity. Rather than seeing desire as a function of lack, Christians must understand desire as a productive force, as an abundant overflow that continually brings new possibilities into existence.[143] Rather than seeing desire as a form of self-centred greed, Christians must understood desire as an expression of passion for the other and, in particular, passion for God.[144] Understood in these ways desire, rather than being aligned with a sense of self-entitlement, becomes aligned with grateful and creative participation in the inbreaking of God’s kingdom.
Moreover, whereas neoclassicism disciplines the imagination through fear and despair, the Church must liberate the imagination through hope. Imagination, rather than being utilized to produce fantasies that distract us from our fear and despair, can be treated as “thought-in-becoming,” as the sort of thinking that transforms the world, rather than providing us with an escape from the world.[145] Indeed, replacing the theological doctrines of neoclassicism with the theological doctrines of Christianity is precisely the sort of exercise that liberates the imagination in order to transform the socio-political and economic order.[146] Consequently, the real question the Church must ask when confronted with the world of neoclassicism is not what is realistic, practical, or viable, but what is imaginable.[147] That Christians are able to imagine in such an unrestrained manner is premised upon hope that is rooted in God’s promises and God’s history of engagement with the world. As Moltmann argues:
Hope is nothing else than the expectation of those things which faith has believed to have been truly promised by God… That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest… Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it.[148]
Consequently, Christians must become “professionals of hope” with imaginations solely disciplined by the memory of what God has done, and the recollection of the promises of what God has yet to do.[149]
____________
[139] Cf. Hauerwas, After Christendom, 93-94; In Good Company, 26. Hence, Dorothy Day remarks: “once their desires were change, half the battle was won. To make men desire poverty and hard work, that was the problem” (The Long Loneliness: An Autobiography, Illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg [New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1952], 226).
[140] In Good Company, 75.
[141] Cf. Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 95; William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1998), 58.
[142] Cf. Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, 156; Bell Jr., Liberation Theology After the End of History, 72; Eagleton, After Theory, 129; Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Holy Spirit, 173; Cavanaugh, “The Unfreedom of the Free Market”.
[143] This is one of the central assertions of Deleuze and Guattari; cf. Anti-Oedipus, 5-6, 24-27, 296, 380, et passim.
[144] Bell Jr., Liberation Theology After the End of History, 88-91. Since at least Augustine, the Christian tradition has understood God to be the true telos of desire.
[145] On imagination as “thought-in-becoming” cf. Massumi, 96-100.
[146] Cf. Hauerwas, Performing the Faith, 92; Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 1, 4; Bell Jr., Liberation Theology After the End of History, 87; Brueggemann, Texts Under Negotiation, 19-20, 24-25.
[147] Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 44. Bloch also says this well: “He who does not hope for what can never be hoped for, will never find it” (quoted in Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 103). It is this pursuit of the imaginable that leads Day to ask the following: “Why was so much being done in remedying social evils instead of avoiding them in the first place? … Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?” (The Long Loneliness, 45). It was precisely these imaginative questions that led to Day co-founding the Catholic Workers’ movement. In light of examples like this, the Christian call for participation in a ‘realistic second best’ shows a shocking failure in the Christian imagination.
[148] Theology of Hope, 20-21; cf. Hauerwas, Against the Nations, 51; Wallis, The Call to Conversion, 117; Brueggemann, Texts Under Negotiation, 49; Theology of the Old Testament, 169, 173.
[149] The term “professionals of hope” is one that Marcos employs to describe the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Marcos, 19).

III. The Church, the Reformation of Desire and Imagination, and the Recovery of the Public
Having come to the end of our exploration of neoclassicism, this section will explore a Christian alternative by focusing on the Church as the locus that reforms our desire and our imagination in order to offer a public alternative to the stories, space, time, language, and bodies presented by neoclassicism.
III.1 – Why the Church?
The first question that is inevitably raised in this regard is ‘why the Church?’ After all, many who criticize neoclassicism tend to look to the State, and not the Church, for salvation.[125] However, as the argument above has demonstrated, the State has been wholly lost to the powers of neoclassicism and even States that have not fully capitulated to neoclassicism discover that the multinational powers are stronger than they are.[126] Corporations are not only “multinational,” they are “postnational” and no longer need the support of any particular State to maintain global dominance.[127] Ultimately, however, Christians should not look to the State for the solution to neoclassicism because the State itself is rooted in an alternative soteriology to that of the Church, and so Christians must abandon “the myth of the State as Saviour,” which exists as a distortion of the Christian hope.[128]
Reliance upon the State is also one of the three fundamental errors of the counter-culture which arose, as Klein notes, out of “the utter failure of traditional party politics.”[129] Although the counter-culture attempts to effect change outside of the party structure, it still relies upon the State apparatus for the implementation of that change. The second fundamental error of the counter-culture is that, rather than being a means of confronting and overthrowing capitalism, it has consistently been a means of reinvigorating and perpetuating capitalism.[130] Finally, the third error of the counter-culture is that it consistently fails to offer any coherent vision of what an alternative society might actually look like. This line of criticism comes from ‘Che’ Guevara himself. He writes: “We revolutionaries often lack the knowledge and the intellectual audacity to face the task of the development of the new… by methods different from the conventional ones, and the conventional methods suffer from the influence of the society that created them.”[131]
However, Christians are those who affirm that extra ecclesiam nulla salus—which is to say that the salvation of the world is intimately linked to the Church being the Church. The problem is that Christianity in the West has, by and large, lost any sense of what it is to be (and do) Church and has pursued the (social) transformation of the world as though God, and the formation of the people of God, were irrelevant to that pursuit. Thus, we end up in the situation described by Wallis:
No one is asking why we live the way we do. Why? Because most people already know the answer: Christians live the way they do for the same reasons that everybody else lives the way they do… We have lost the visible style of life which was evident in the early Christian communities and which gave their evangelism its compelling power and authority.[132]
Therefore, the Church must recover her identity as a public body, and as an alternative to neoclassicism’s way of structuring life together.[133] The Christian response to neoclassicism must be ecclesial, it must take the form of a community that shows how faith in the Christian God profoundly impacts the way in which we structure life together.[134] This then requires a recovery of the understanding of Christians as the tertium genus, and means that we are, in the words of MacIntyre, “waiting not for a Godot, but for another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict.”[135]
Recovering the Church as polis does not mean attempting to return to Christendom or reinvigorating Constantinianism. Rather, it means that Christians must focus on how they, as a Church, live out their convictions, instead of trying to force a secular society to live Christianly.[136] This is one of the fundamental flaws made by Waterman and Hay: they think that a Christian public ethic must be dictated by principles that can be applied to those outside the Church and so they settle for a highly compromised “second best”—never realizing that the Church is the public ethic of Christianity.[137] Waterman and Hay could both benefit from reading Chomsky who reminds us that “[w]orking people of nineteenth century North America did not plead with their rulers to be more benevolent. Rather, they denied their right to rule.”[138] So also, the Church that recognizes the sole Lordship of Jesus, should plead a little less with the Powers, and should focus more on living together in a way that denies their right to rule.
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[125] In particular, one thinks of those like Keynes, Bell, Barber, Klein, and Hays, who all look to the State to save us from neoclassicism.
[126] Cf. Bukharin, 124, 128. On the loss of the State to corporate powers, recall the massive amount of corporate financial support required to run a significant political campaign.
[127] On corporations as “postnational” cf. Barber, 23. Thomas Jefferson foresaw that capitalism could develop into this for, as he mentioned in a letter to a colleague, “Merchants have no country” (The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 14, ed. by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellergy Bergh [Washington: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904], 119).
[128] On this myth, cf. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 9-52. This reliance upon the State is, perhaps, the greatest error made by many liberation theologians (cf. Bell Jr., Liberation Theology After the End of History, 70), and it is the greatest mistake that Wallis makes as he moves from his reliance upon the Christian community (demonstrated in The Call to Conversion) to his reliance upon the State (demonstrated in God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It [New York: HarperCollins, 2006]).
[129] Fences and Windows, 21.
[130] Especially through its pursuit of radical individualism. This is well documented by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in The Rebel Sell: why the culture can’t be jammed (Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2004); cf. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, 89-90, 179-80; Bell, xxvi-xxvii. The result, as David Brooks notes, is a society where the Bohemians meld with the Bourgeiosie to produce all-consuming “bobos” (Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There [New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000]).
[131] Venceremos! The Speeches and Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara, ed. by John Gerassi (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1968), 89-90.
[132] The Call to Conversion, 19; cf. 29, 35, 116. Consequently, Marxist atheists raise damning criticisms of the “moneyed piety” of the Church which “bristles at see-through blouses, but not at slums in which half-naked children starve” (Bloch, 144).
[133] No contemporary theologian has been more adamant about this point than Stanley Hauerwas, who regularly refers to the Church as a polis, as colony, as civitas, and as the model and prototype of what the State should be; cf. In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 6, 8; Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), 42; A Better Hope Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2000), 122-24; After Christendom? How to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation are Bad Ideas (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991), 6-7, 26; Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004), 206; Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 12, 41-42, 83. To a certain extent Hauerwas is following Karl Barth in describing the Church in this way (cf. Against the Stream: Shorter Post-War Writings, 1946-52, ed. by Ronald Gregor Smith, trans. by E. M. Delacour and Stanley Godman [London: SCM Press, 1954], 18-19, 48.
[134] Cf. Hauerwas, A Better Hope, 44; Against the Nations, 42; Wallis, The Call to Conversion, 69, 109, 114; Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Holy Spirit, 15; Gutierrez, We Drink From Our Own Wells, 51. Of course, the necessity of community for creating and sustaining effective resistance to the regnant neoclassical powers is also a prominent theme in non-Christian writing; cf. Eagleton, After Theory, 128; Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, Short Circuits (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 38.
[135] MacIntyre, 245.
[136] Cf. Hauerwas, After Christendom, 18; Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 88; Wallis, The Call to Conversion, 102; George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville: WJKP, 1984), 128; N. T. Wright, The Crown and the Fire: Meditations on the Cross and the Life of the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 84.
[137] Waterman, 63 (and so we resolve the second major objection raised in this article); Hay, 58, 63, 311-13.
[138] Profit Over People, 55-56.