Aware of the war waged, in our time and for our sake, against the poor, we must yield to [the] appeal for solidarity with the oppressed. We must answer [the] call for resistance to the sacred routines legitimating the course of empire.
~ Neil Elliott, Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle, 230.
Up until this point, I have concentrated on exploring some expressions of sharing that I believe should define those who are “in Christ.” In this regard, I have been thinking especially (but not exclusively) of the Johannine literature which reminds us that Christians should have a striking public (i.e. political) presence, precisely because of the ways in which they love one another. Of course, what we tend to do is romanticise or spiritualise John's talk of “love” instead of beginning to truly explore how we can move concretely into ever deeper levels of intimacy with God and one another. Therefore, having explored some of the ways in which intra-Christian sharing should be praticed, I would like to spend some time in this post exploring the question of how we can engage in extra-Christian sharing — and, once again, I would like to advocate for a form of charity that capitalism would label as “nonsensical.”
At this point, it is important to recall that the Church exists in the world, in order to participate in God's mission to and for the world. Christians are transformed by God so that they can move into the groaning-places of the world, as agents of God's new creation (as Tom Wright has reminded us time after time). Therefore, by beginning to envision a form of Christianity that can offer a genuine alternative to capitalism, I am not only exploring some of the ways in which the Church can be “holy” (i.e. set apart and uncompromised by corrupting influences, like capitalism) in a sectarian way. Rather, Christians are to be holy so that they can be effective witnesses within the world. Indeed, it is only when the Church is holy, and true to her identity, that transformation can occur within the world (as Hauerwas reminds us). Consequently, it is worth exploring some of the ways in which sharing with those who are not yet explicitly “in Christ” is a part of the mission of God and of the people of God.
It is worth emphasising that God's mission, and the mission to which God calls God's people, is one that is especially attentive to the plight of the poor, the vulnerable, the sick, the oppressed, and the forsaken. An honest study of the bible (from the Torah, to the prophets, to the Gospels, to the epistles) can only lead us to conclude that the liberation theologians are correct to argue that God demonstrates a “preferential option” for the poor. Indeed, God's especial attention to the poor is so strong that, when the Word of God becomes incarnate in the world, the Word takes on the form of one who is poor, homeless, and vulnerable. In fact, Jesus, the incarnate Word, becomes so vulnerable that he dies, helpless and abandoned, upon a cross. Therefore, the Church must both (a) demonstrate an equal “preferential option” for the poor; and (b) emulate the life-trajectory established by Jesus (a model that Paul develops in Phil 2). Thus, we see that the Church as a “community of beggars” may end up looking a lot more like actual beggars than we first imagined.
Yet both of these aspects — the priorities and the life-trajectory — of the Christian mission are at odds with the priorities and the life-trajectory that capitalism seeks to impose upon us. Thus, on the first point, capitalism teaches us to value the wealthy more than the poor, and those who “contribute” to the economy (through consumption, investment, and “responsible” debt-accumulation) more than those who do not — like the poor and homeless, who are often described as “parasites” “leeching” off of the system. Further, on the second point, capitalism teaches us a life-trajectory of “upward mobility.” It urges us to (continually) move on to a higher paying job, a more expensive house, a cleaner more respectable neighbourhood, a flashier car (or just another car), and so on and so forth.
Consequently, we can begin to see why sharing in a way that prioritises the poor while concomitantly emulating the life-trajectory of “downward mobility” established by Jesus appears to be so utterly nonsensical within the structures of capitalism. Within capitalism, sharing with the poor is, by and large, a wasted investment — but it can still be glorified as a “noble,” “humanistic,” “altruistic,” “romantic,” or “heroic” endeavour (note how the language used by capitalism to praise charity also simultaneously relieves most of us from the demands of charity — after all, we're just ordinary people, not noble or romantic heroes!). And this is precisely why the way in which Christians are called to share with the poor is attached to a life-trajectory; we are never to just share our resources with the poor — we are called to share our lives together with the poor. In my next post I will explore some of the concrete ways in which the Christian community can engage in this form of sharing.

Far more than political agitation, class warfare, or zeal for national liberation, [Paul] had come to believe that a focused concentration on sacrifice and sharing—monetary sharing as well as spiritual selflessness—was the most potent and effective weapon that God's elect could possibly use against the forces of darkness.
~ Richard A. Horsley & Neil Asher Silberman, The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World, 182.
So long as we eat our bread together we shall have sufficient even with the least.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 59.
In Part V of this series, I began to explore some of the practical ways in which Christians can exercise “nonsensical charity” by practicing the sharing that prevents debt, and the sharing of debt. Then, in Part VI, I briefly stepped back from from the discussion of practical forms of sharing in order to speak about the “Reformation of Desire.” Therefore, in this post, I would like to return to the theme of sharing, by exploring what might happen when we begin to think about sharing “life together.”
Of course, the expression “life together” is an allusion to Bonhoeffer's classic work on community (a work that served as something of a manifesto for the Christian community that Bonhoeffer lived in for awhile during WWII). It is worth recalling this text as we explore the practicalities of sharing within the Christian community. After all, Bonhoeffer reminds us that we must be practical when it comes to community, lest we cling too much to our “visions” of community and are thus overcome by the disillusionment that occurs when the reality of community hits us, as it inevitably will. Thus, Bonhoeffer argues that:
Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight… The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community.
So, with this warning in mind, what to I mean when I use the phrase “sharing life together”? Essentially, I am trying to emphasise that it is the totality of our lives that we should learn to share together. According to the model(s) established in the New Testament (NT), Christian community has less to do with Sunday worship services, coupled with a weeknight bible study and monthly volunteer service, and more to do with learning to share all areas of our lives — our living, our eating, our learning, our working, our playing — together. Having said that, I should emphasise that the call to share all areas of our lives together, does not mean we are to share absolutely everything together all the time (thus, for example, the practice of solitude is an important Christian discipline [so not all time is shared], and sex is only to be shared within the bounds of marriage [so not all things are shared]).
Therefore, if we are to properly understand the extent to which we are called to share our lives together, I think it is very important that we understand the way that “family” language is employed by Jesus, Paul, and the other NT authors. What we see in the NT is that one's family is now redefined as the community of faith. Thus, we see Jesus continually redefining one's family in this way (cf. Mk 3.31-35; Mk 10.29-30; Mt 23.8-9). In this way, sibling language comes to dominate references to others who belong to the community of faith. Thus, members of the community founded by Christ most commonly refer to one another as “brothers and sisters” (the use of this language so dominates the NT that the references are too many to cite here).
However, to understand why this shift in the identity of one's family is important for how we engage in sharing, we need to recall the significance of family and kinship within the context in which Jesus and the early Church lived (here, I will be drawing from deSilva's book, Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity).
Within the honor-based Greco-Roman culture, and the similarly honor-based Jewish subculture, relationships with those outside of one's kinship group was marked by competition and distrust. However, relationship within one's extended family was defined by cooperation, solidarity, trust, loyalty, harmony, unity, honor sharing, forgiveness, gentleness, and forbearance. Now, what is particularly interesting, is that the relationship that is to exist between siblings, is held by ancient authors to be the “closest, strongest and most intimate of relationships in the ancient world.” Where this starts to hit home is how this unity among brothers and sisters is to be expressed through their attitude towards their wealth. Thus, deSilva writes: “Since friends were held to 'own all things in common'… the same was all the more to be expected of close kin” (deSilva is quoting Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in this passage, and he also points to passages from Plutarch and Pseudo-Phocylides that support this position on the way in which siblings are to deal with wealth).
This, then, leads us quite naturally to the example of the early Jerusalem Church that we encounter in Acts. What we see here is neither an early expression of communism, nor is it a radical (but doomed) experiment. Rather, what we see in Acts is a Church that actually takes their new family status seriously. Thus, in Acts 4.32, 34-35, Luke writes the following:
And the congregation of those who believed were of one heart and soul; and not one of them claimed that anything belonging to him was his own, but all things were common property to them… For there was not a needy person among them, for all who were owners of land or houses would sell them and bring the proceeds of the sales and lay them at the apostles' feet, and they would be distributed to each as any had need.
What is radical about the Church in Acts is not the sharing that existed among its members — after all, this sort of sharing was the way brothers and sisters were supposed to relate to one another (cf. the deSilva quote that I used at the opening of Part V). Rather, what is radical about this Church as that one's brothers and sisters was no longer determined by ethnicity, social status, or any other factor apart from being a follower of Jesus.
Thus, if those of us who are “in Christ” today are to truly relate to one another as “brothers and sisters” (instead of simply ab/using that language as empty rhetoric in order to project a false sense of intimacy) we need to begin to explore ways in which we can share life together in a way comparable to the Church in Acts (which, by the way, was built upon the community of sharing that existed among Jesus and his disciples, and which continued to be the model for Paul's churches… but more on Paul in a minute).
This, then, leads us to contemporary practicalities, and I would like to suggest that one of the most important practical steps in sharing life together (in a way that offers a genuine alternative to the social structures of capitalism) is learning to share our space (i.e. our homes!) with one another. Christians must begin to explore ways of creating and sustaining the household as an intentional community, structured not around one's genetic family, but around the redefined family of those in Christ.
Of course, capitalism teaches us that this approach to sharing space is absolutely nonsensical. Our honor, our respect, is demonstrated by our ability to live independently of others. A sign of my adult status is the fact that I have my own place — if I am single, I buy a condo; if I am married, my wife and I have “arrived,” or at least are well on our way, when we buy our own house (of course, we'll probably begin with a “starter house” before we move on to bigger and better things).
However, this approach not only requires a form of debt-accumulation and wealth-hording that is inexcusable from a Christian perspective (i.e. given the need that exists among our Christian brothers and sisters — let alone the need that exists in all areas of our world! — there is no possible Christian justification for spending this much time and money paying for a house that will be occupied simply by myself, my wife, and our kids), this popular approach also sustains and strengthens a definition of family that is completely at odds with the Christian understanding of family — thus, when Christians choose to live in this way, they continue to support the structures of capitalism, rather than demonstrating a genuine Christian alternative. Unfortunately, this is but one of the ways in which the Christian concern to “Focus on the Family” and restore “Family Values” has completely missed the boat. That movement has adopted a false definition of “family” and, thus, it achieves exactly the opposite of its professed goal (ie. instead of sustaining the structures that can, in turn, sustain holy living within the Christian community, this movement further weakens the ways in which Christianity can genuinely resist outside corrupting influences, by adopting and employing a outside, and corrupt, model of “family”!).
Therefore, I would like to envision community-homes wherein couples, singles, children, seniors, single parents, etc., all share life together as the newly reconstituted family of those in Christ (I actually almost subtitled this post “Sharing Family” but I knew that would trigger memories of cults and “spouse-swapping” and so I thought it best to rework the title). Can we imagine what this approach to life together could do for a single mother who needs to somehow work and raise a child? Can we imagine what this approach could do for seniors who are generally pushed out of the public eye? Can we imagine what this could do singles who are looking for deeper levels of intimacy within the community of faith? The single mother receives free child care, the senior receives value and public space, and the single person receives intimate and fulfilling relationships with his or her brothers and sisters in Christ.
Furthermore, once we start sharing life together by sharing our space and our homes, it becomes possible to engage in other forms of sharing that counter the structures of capitalism. Especially, if community-homes decide to root themselves (missionally and incarnationally) within particular neighbourhoods (of course, the language of “mission” and “incarnation” means that we are simply deciding to try to learn how to love our neighbours). Thus, for example, the community-home of which I am a part, has chosen to root itself within Vancouver's downtown eastside — this means that we all live, work, volunteer, and go to church, within this neighbourhood. Everything is within walking distance — and so we have no need of a car (or a car each — which are often “needed” in houses where both partners work at commuter jobs) and thus we have learned another way to avoid debt and wealth accumulation (and we also learn how to be better stewards of the creation that has been entrusted to us). Of course, vehicles are but one example — there are all sorts of other things that we spend money on, that can be shared in a community-home (or even between a network of community-homes!), all we need is a little imagination to come up with other examples.
At this point is it worth recalling a comment posted previously on my entry about debt. A friend wrote:
I've had these conversations over and over again with people here… and its freakin the shit out of me and them, because we want to and we know, and then we added up the debt of our small little community and its almost a million dollars, and it scares the crap out of me to want to pay that off with them (emphasis added).
Now, my suspicion is that, when we begin to share life together in this way — when we're not all paying off our own mortgages, our own car payments, and so on — then suddenly the amount of debt that confronts us is much smaller and much more manageable.
Finally, it is worth remembering, at this point, that the family of those in Christ is a global family. Therefore, we must learn how to share our lives, and our resources, with our brothers in sisters who are in need in the two-thirds world. We must learn to not only share space, we must share across space. This sharing across space is something Paul never forgot. In fact, it was one of his top priorities. Paul saw one of his most important achievements to be “the collection,” that he gathered from his church-communities for the poor Christian community in Jerusalem.
This, then, leads me to a response to another comment I received on my post about debt, which is worth quoting at length:
I entirely agree if it was only the developed post-industrial world we were talking about here… I, on the other hand, live in Guatemala where this doesn't work so well. What is the responsibility of such 'First-World' intentional communities to the global poor? Also, such communities do not work very well if all their members are extremely poor (i.e., in a developing country). It seems that all alternative communities require a certain degree of cultural capital or privilege not accessible to the worst off among us.
In response to this, I would like to envision intentional community-homes in the West establishing connections with “brother” and “sister” communities in the two-thirds world. In this way, Western communities can provide the “cultural capital” and “privilege” that is “not accessible to the worst off among us.” It is one of my hopes that the community-home of which I am a part will be able to meet, and help sustain, another community-home in the two-thirds world (actually, with a little imagination, all sorts of other exciting possibilities could come from this connection).
Bonhoeffer reminds us that we will have sufficient for all, even the least, as long as we break bread together. What we need to remember is that every time we partake of the Eucharist, we are breaking bread with the global body of Christ, with Christians in the two-thirds world. Thus, after such bread breaking, how can we not also share all things with them?

I had intended to continue this series by talking about some of the other forms of sharing that I think should define the Christian community. However, as this series progresses, I am continually confronted with the fact that one of the largest obstacles to embodying a form of Christianity that offers a genuine alternative to capitalism is that we just don't really want to live another way — thus, in Part II, I wrote about a “crisis of willing” and, in Part V, I spoke about the “hold” that a consumer lifestyle has on most Western Christians.
Therefore, in this post, I would like to take a step back, and explore why this is such a problem. And, to do that, I would like to begin with a quote from Slavoj Zizek.
Jenny Holzer's famous truism 'Protect me from what I want'… can either be read as an ironic reference to the standard male chauvinist wisdom that a woman left to herself gets caught up in self-destructive fury — she needs to be protected from herself by benevolent male domination: 'Protect me from the excessive self-destructive desire in me that I myself am not able to dominate.' Or else it can be read in a more radical way, as pointing towards the fact that in today's patriarchal society, women's desire is radically alienated: she desires what men expect her to desire, desires to be desired by men. In this case, 'Protect me from what I want' means: 'Precisely when I seem to express my authentic innermost longing, “what I want” has already been imposed on me by the patriarchal order that tells me what to desire, so the first condition of my liberation is that I break the vicious cycle of my alienated desire and learn to formulate my desire in an autonomous way.
~ Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan, 38-39.
I choose to quote this passage from Zizek in full at the opening of this post because I think he provides an excellent example of one of the ways in which our social setting conditions and alienates even our most “authentic and innermost longing.” What we learn from Zizek (and even more from Foucault!) is that society disciplines our desires — it forms us in such a way that we “naturally” end up finding some things desirable and other things undesirable.
Thus, those of us who live in a society dominated by capitalism need to recognise that even our most “authentic and innermost longings” have been conditioned by capitalism. What we desire ends up being that which sustains and strengthens the structures of capitalism, and what we find undesirable is that which challenges capitalism.
What Zizek's example shows is just how insidious this conditioning of desire can end up being. Thus, even those who realize that their desire has been conditioned, still find that their longings function in an alienated manner. In Zizek's example we see a woman that awakens to the realisation that patriarchy has conditioned her to desire to be desired by men… yet she still desires to be desired by men. Thus, her cry becomes: “Protect me from what I want!”
It is not hard to think of other examples. I know many Christian men who have awakened to the realisation that capitalism conditions them to treat women as (sexual) objects (after all, if people can be made into objects, then they can become goods that can be bought, sold, and consumed). However, these men also discover that they are still attracted to those things that present women as (sexual) objects — objects that even desire their own consumption! In this way we end up with a great deal of Christian men addicted to internet pornography. Their cry also becomes: “Protect us from what we want!”
What really got me thinking about all this in more detail was something a friend of mine wrote recently. He and his wife are rooted in an innercity neighbourhood and trying to find ways of journeying alongside of the people there. He wrote this:
I've talked about doing a lot of things… I wanted to have people over for dinners, to invite those I find on the street into my home to hang out and eat. I also wanted to be involved in the local school… I want to spend time with my neighbours… However, as days, then weeks and finally years go by, and I haven't acted…I begin to ask myself why.
[A]nd the answer always comes back…because I don't really, truly, want to. If I did, then I would.
Therefore, if the Christian community is to exist as a truly genuine alternative to capitalism we need another Reformation. However, we need something that goes deeper than a re-formation of doctrine; what we need is a re-formation of desire. How then can we begin to engage in such a re-formation?
Awakening to the truth of our situation is an important first step. Later in his book on Lacan, Zizek argues that Lacan believed that our desires have become conditioned because our lives are based upon fantasy. Fantasy, according to Zizek, serves two functions: first, it serves as a screen that protects us from being overwhelmed by the truly traumatic truth of the reality of our situation; and, second, it literally teaches us how to desire. This second point is especially instructive, for, as Zizek says, “fantasy does not mean that when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality I fantasize about eating it,” rather, he goes on to say, fantasy is that which teaches me to desire the strawberry cake in the first place (consequently, we learn why capitalism and modern technology fit so well together — the internet, television, and film, along with all forms of advertising, become the means of inundating us with fantasies that teach us how to desire). Thus, Zizek concludes that: “For Lacan, the ultimate ethical task is that of true awakening: not only from sleep, but from the spell of fantasy that controls us even more when we are awake.”
However, awakening to reality, and choosing to remain in the place where we are confronted with “unbearable, traumatic truth” (Zizek), is only half of the solution. For, as we saw above, we can learn that our desires our warped but that knowledge does not re-form those desires.
Therefore, it is useful to comment a bit more on my friend's example. The reason why my friend draws the conclusion that he does, is because he is reflecting upon something he recently read — a passage where a man, who had visited a monastery for a few days, asks a monk how he can continue patterns of prayer in his daily life. The monk responds with these words: “The first thing is that you have to want to pray. No amount of discipline or exercise or reading will do it if there is no desire.” The monk may be correct to assert that “no amount of discipline” will inspire prayer if there is no desire to pray. However, what the monk fails to mention (as far as I can tell) is that we must learn the disciplines that will condition us to desire to pray (of course, the paradox in this is that it is often the practice of regular prayer that disciplines us to want to pray so that we can pray regularly — which is why another monk once said, “Fake it, until you make it”!)
If the Christian community is to offer a genuine alternative to capitalism, it must be a place the exercises counter-disciplines to the disciplines of capitalism (this point is one that runs through the writings of Daniel M. Bell Jr. [cf. Liberation Theology after the End of History: the refusal to cease suffering] and William T. Cavanaugh [cf. Torture and Eucharist and Theopolitical Imagination]). In this regard, things like baptism, the Eucharist, the Church calendar, the liturgy, and the spiritual disciplines gain a new relevance. These things, far from being “spiritual” activities that are divorced from our day-to-day lives, are the practices that can re-form our desires.
However, developing counter-disciplines is also only a part of the solution. There is one more crucial component necessary for the re-formation of desire.
In Ro 7, Paul writes the following words:
For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want… I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good… I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?
In this passage, Paul is describing a person who has awakened to the reality that his or her desire has been conditioned and warped by outside influences. However, although this person comes to this realisation (in “the law of my mind”), he or she is incapable of acting differently (because of “the law of sin which is in my members”). Thus, the person concludes by crying out: “Protect me from what I want” (i.e. “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?”).
However, the crucial thing to realise is that Paul is not describing his experience as a Christian in this passage. Rather, he is describing his pre-conversion experience from a post-conversion perspective. After all, Ro 7 leads directly to Ro 8, where Paul goes on to describe his post-conversion experience, and, in doing so, he provides us with the answer to the question of “Who will set me free from the body of this death?” and the response to the cry: Protect me from what I want!”
In Ro 8, we learn that it is the Spirit of God who liberates our desire and makes new ways of living genuinely possible. This leaves us, rather uncomfortably, in a place of radical dependence. The re-formation of desire depends, ultimately, upon the in-breaking of God's Spirit.
By way of conclusion, it is worth recalling the experience of the disciples with Jesus. The disciples were those whose desires had been disciplined — they wanted Rome to be overthrown, they wanted the Jewish state to be restored, and they wanted to be the new rulers of that newly reconstituted state. In essence, their desires had been conditioned by their culture, and even though Jesus tried to teach them to desire other things (like desiring to serve others instead of desiring to be served by others) they never really got the point. Even when it looked like they understood what Jesus was saying, they were still unable to act out of that new understanding. Thus, even though we see the disciples all swearing that they would never betray Jesus, when the time comes we see them all run away. The disciples want to be loyal to Jesus, but their desires have been so disciplined that none of them are. It is only the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost that changes everything. After the Spirit comes we see the re-formation of the disciples desires, and we see those re-formed desires inspiring truly new, and wonderful, actions and results within the Christian community.
Now, what is particularly encouraging about all this (apart from the fact that it shows us that God's Spirit does break-in and re-form desire), is that Jesus commits himself to working with disciples whose desires have not yet been fully re-formed. Tom Wright captures this idea well when he writes the following:
[Jesus'] disciples, longing for a leader who would fulfill their dreams, were bound to hear his call to revolutionary love in terms of their own love of revolution. Jesus worked within that misunderstanding. It is just as well that he did. If the creator of the world had waited for a time when people would have understood his desire to save the world, and would have responded without ambiguity to that desire, he would have waited for ever (New Tasks for a Renewed Church, 50).
Therefore, let us continue to confront, and expose, the “traumatic” reality of our contemporary situation within capitalism, let us learn to develop the disciplines that re-form our desires, and let us continually cry out for the Spirit to be poured out upon us anew so that the re-formation of a Christian community out of capitalism will be fulfilled, all the while hoping that Jesus is, somehow, working, even now, within our misunderstandings.

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
~ Paul, Gal 5.1
I would now like to move into some of the more concrete outworkings of what I have been exploring in this series on Christianity and capitalism by exploring some of the ways in which the nonsensical charity of Christianity should play out in our contemporary context.
First of all, I would like to envision both the sharing that prevents debt and the sharing of debt within the Christian community. Few things are so effective in ensuring the unchallenged sovereignty of capitalism as the structures of debt that pervade all areas of our society. Debt ensures that we remain in a state akin to slavery. We are held in bondage by the credit companies, the banks, the government, the powers (and just like slavery in days gone by, so also we have trouble imagining an economic system that does not rely on debt).
It is interesting to note that even at the time of Jesus, debt was perceived to be one of the main structures that maintained oppressive powers. Thus, first-century Jewish liberation movements addressed debt as a central issue. It is worth highlighting two examples. During the “Great Revolt” of the Jews against Rome (AD 66-70), one of the first things the revolutionaries did was burn the debt records (cf. Josephus' Wars, 2:427). However, some thirty years prior to this revolt another alternative had been initiated — Jesus began a community that “held all things in common” so that “no one was in need” and in this way a powerful, yet nonviolent, alternative to the structures of debt was established and quietly began to grow and move towards the heart of the empire. The first option, the option taken by the Jewish revolutionaries (which, by the way, is the same option as the one taken by Tyler Durden in Fight Club) is, however, one that is forever closed to those who pursue the second option, the option taken by Jesus.
Therefore, the first step to being liberated from capitalism is to also refuse debt as an option within our lives. However, if the avoidance of debt is to be a realistic option for many of us (especially those of us who are poor and on the margins) we must begin to share financially with one another. This means doing “nonsensical” things like having a community that sponsors a person's university education so that that person isn't driven into debt by a Student Loan. This means doing things like supporting poor parents so that they can raise children without taking out loans and cash advances in order to get by. This also means living in a community where possession of credit cards is mostly a non-option. Living as a credit free society means moving through a series of steps. The first step would be to limit the number of credit cards within a household. Then, as we realise that we are doing fine by sharing one another's expenses, we could limit the number of credit cards within a particular Christian community and, ultimately, I believe that we could arrive at a place where there is no need for credit cards within the Christian community. When we can rely on one another for financial assistance then the drive to maintain a credit card in order to have a “good credit rating” (i.e. the drive to ensure that the slave-masters stay happy with us) becomes unnecessary.
However, because few of us are living in a state where we are free from debt, we need to realise that, if we are to share in ways that offer a genuinely liberating alternative, we must also share the debts that have already been accrued by other members of the Christian community. There are few actions that would be considered more nonsensical within capitalism than voluntarily paying off the debt of another person, but to engage in this sort of activity is the only honest option for a community that has been taught to pray for the forgiveness of debts (remember the Lord's Prayer?). This sharing of debt, that shares debt in order to overcome debt itself, should be a central aspect of the Church's proclamation of forgiveness. When we start living in this way, then maybe we will be able to remember that the gospel is literally good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, and release for the oppressed. Of course, by describing the gospel in this way, I am quoting Jesus' “mission statement” as it appears in Lk 4, and it is interesting to note that this mission statement draws upon Israel's Jubilee tradition — a tradition that was centred upon the forgiveness of all financial and material debts!
It seems to me that the steps I have described here are quite simple to follow… but for one thing. That “thing” is the hold that a consumer lifestyle still has on most Western Christians. To pursue these simple steps we must begin to engage in a form of charity that restructures our lives and restricts our access to possessions, entertainment, and personal indulgences. The forms of charity that make sense within capitalism are forms that do not hinder my access to these things. Thus, just how genuinely Christian our charity is will be revealed by how willing we are to surrender precisely these things as we learn to share in new ways. I am reminded, once again, of the words of Mother Teresa who once said the following:
I don't want you to give from your excess. I want you to give in a way that hurts.
If we only give from our excess, our giving does not create an alternative to the structures of capitalism; rather it ensures that we remain the slaves of credit companies, banks, and governments. Only when we give “in a way that hurts” do we begin to embody a Christian alternative to capitalism that liberates us from debt.

The conviction that siblings are to make use in common of their inherited goods undergirds the exhortation to benefit and share with one another within the community… As siblings in Christ, the believers are to pool their resources in every way so that each member of the family knows the love of this family at his or her point of need…
What we witness in the early church is not an attempt to create a system of government and economics enforced through terror but rather an attitude that each believer has toward fellow believers—“love for brothers and sisters”—and lives without reservation.
~ David A. deSilva, Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity, 215-16.
I was first personally introduced to a more radical form of sharing through my interactions with another community of “beggars” — the homeless addicts that I first encountered in Toronto, and continue to encounter in the neighbourhood in which I live. Within this community, sharing looks rather different than the form of sharing that is encouraged in the churches I know (you know, tithe 10%, donate tax write-offs to charity, and give your old clothes to the Salvation Army, that sort of thing). Indeed, the sharing demonstrated in this community of beggars shames most Christian expressions of sharing.
I think, for example, of “Johnny.” Johnny is a gifted young man who lives for music… but one day he pawned his guitar so that he had enough money to support his heroin addiction. “I put my soul in the pawn shop today,” he said to me. Heroin meant so much to Johnny that he was willing to risk losing the thing he loved above all else in order to get high. But here's the catch: when it came time to shoot up, Johnny didn't think twice about sharing what he had with his friends. Indeed, one sees this all the time with addicts — they will surrender everything they have to score one point of heroin, or one rock, or whatever, yet they will, time after time, share that point, or that rock, or whatever, with their friends. The only thing that they have, the thing that they have sacrificed everything to get, this is what they share.
I believe that those of us who are eager to be anything but beggars would argue that applying this standard to our approach to sharing would be completely nonsensical. Capitalism does not teach us to share all that we have, and it certainly does not teach us to share that which we surrender everything else to get. Far from it. Capitalism teaches me to hold desperately to the core of what mine, just as it teaches me that, if I work hard to get something, then I don't have to share it with anybody. In fact, I'll work just as hard to ensure that such a precious thing stays mine.
Thus, capitalism conditions us to think that there is, in fact, little that is virtuous in the form of sharing that I have just described — it would tell us that I simply provided an example of beggars preying on other beggars in order to move deeply into self-destructive addictions. Therefore, my argument that such a destructive act as sharing drugs should be considered virtuous would be discarded as a nonsensical argument. However, although this objection is cloaked in the language of moral/charitable concern (i.e. “drugs are bad, and giving highly addictive drugs to your friends is very bad”), I suspect that, at its root, it is motivated by the fear of being genuinely confronted with a form of sharing that goes far beyond anything we have ever offered.
Thus, I persist in believing that this “nonsensical” form of sharing should challenge the form of sharing embodied in our community of beggars — the Church (not so say that there isn't a great deal of overlap in the two communities of beggars that I am talking about here). Furthermore, that our sharing does not appear to be just as nonsensical leads me to suspect that what is genuinely Christian about our sharing might have been lost.
That Christian sharing should appear nonsensical to those whose ways of living are dictated by capitalism becomes evident when we realise that the sharing (or “charity”) that is praised by capitalism (i.e. the charity that “makes sense” within capitalism) is actually a mode of charity that perpetuates the foundational structures of capitalism. The ways in which Western nations have used “foreign aid” to drive other nations into debt is perhaps the most obvious example of this, but other examples abound: the ways in which Christian social agencies and churches perpetuate the structures of capitalism by accepting charitable donations from major corporations should be considered, as we should also consider the ways in which popular approaches to tithing allow me to give 10% of my earnings to a church/charity and then feel fine about spending the remaining 90% on me. Christian sharing, however, must move beyond such superficial forms of charity in order to offer a genuine alternative to capitalism. And I suspect that such sharing will be labeled “nonsensical” because it will appear to be “impractical,” “wasteful,” or “foolish.”
So what are some of the concrete forms of sharing that should take place within the Christian community if we are to live as an alternative to capitalism? I'll get to that soon (I hope).

In a recent post, I argued that we needed to understand justice as living out the gratitude that is proper to those who are recipients of grace. Furthermore, I suggested understanding justice in this way has significant implications for how we go about pursuing justice today. I have continued to turn this around in my mind — asking myself questions like: what exactly are those implications? — and I was led back to a point made by a British theologian, David Ford.
In his book, The Shape of Living, Ford argues that our lives are shaped by “overwhelmings.” We all encounter various things in life that overwhelm us — like the overwhelming beauty of a sunset, or the overwhelming darkness of a violent assault, or whatever — and it is how we respond to those “overwhelmings” that determines the shape of our lives. Indeed, Ford argues that, because we will encounter both overwhelmingly good things and overwhelmingly evil things, we are forced to choose which overwhelming will be more foundational for how we live.
Therefore, the pursuit of justice defined as “living out the gratitude that is proper to those who are recipients of grace” requires that our lives be founded on an overwhelming encounter with God's grace and forgiveness. If this is the overwhelming that runs deeper than all others, then gratitude will naturally define us. We have encountered a God whose love for us is indescribable (I can't even find the words, staggering? profound? tender? powerful? overwhelming?). How, then, can we not live lives of gratitude?
Therefore, if this is the foundation of a Christian understanding of justice, what then are some of the implications for the Christian pursuit of justice?
First, this means that Christian justice will be marked by love. Christian justice is love because it flows from the place of being God's beloved — we are those who have been loved much; how can we not go forth to love others much as well? Thus, the pursuit of justice is nothing more than obedience to the command to “love your neighbour.” The dichotomy between love and justice (and God's love and justice, in particular) that is often made in various circles is absolutely false. Justice is the practice of gratitude-as-love within the context of injustice.
Secondly, and just as important, this means that Christian justice will be marked by forgiveness. Love and forgiveness are two sides of one coin but his point is often neglected (i.e. talk of forgiveness is ignored in social justice circles) or denied (i.e. forgiveness is seen as the opposite of justice in social justice circles) so it is worth pausing here. Here is the point that I want to make: the overwhelming that we encounter in God's love and forgiveness is greater than any overwhelming we encounter in the injustices that we personally experience. Therefore, the gratitude that flows from my state of being beloved is greater than the sorrow or anger I experience from the state of being wounded. Because of this, I am empowered to respond freely with forgiveness. This is why Paul can say that even in violent persecution, torture, and death, we are still “more than conquerors” because of the overwhelming love of God (Ro 8). Thus, Paul goes on to say that we should love, forgive, and do good to our enemies (Ro 12), just as Jesus tells us to go the extra mile, give to the thief, and turn the other cheek to the one who strikes us (Mt 5). Therefore, the only response that I can make to those who treat me unjustly is to live out the gratitude of a recipient of grace by forgiving the one who treats me this way.
This is why the notion of “justice-as-retribution” should be totally foreign to the Christian approach. This is why “vengeance” is reserved for God; it is reserved for God because the pursuit of vengeance is antithetical to the practices of gratitude. If we are truly grateful — as we will be if we have truly encountered God's love — then we will love and forgive. We are those who have been forgiven much, how can we not go forth and forgive others much as well?
[I should perhaps note that this talk of “forgiveness” should not sidetrack our resistance to, confrontation with, and excommunication of, oppressive powers but that's not the point I'm trying to make at the moment.]

The tragedy of the Church is that it has failed to be a place that heals brokenness. Therefore, Christians come to Church so overwhelmed by their own wounds, that they have no desire, or ability, to journey into the brokenness of others. Instead they run away from any broken people or places. Tragically, the Church becomes that which helps people to flee from brokenness instead of that which encourages us to journey into all brokenness so that all can be healed.
Another way of stating this tragedy would be as follows:
The tragedy of the Church is that it has failed to embody the proclamation of the forgiveness of sins and has, instead, attempted to aid in the flight from the world of Sin and Death, rather than being an agent of God's new creation.
(And if there is no healing, no forgiveness, and no new creation in our churches, then I can't help but wonder if there is no Spirit there as well…)

Because I am suspicious about the ways in which the language of “justice” is employed within our culture, I have tended to avoid that sort of language altogether (and have instead spoken of pursuing “cruciform love” and becoming “agents of God's new creation”). However, speaking at a conference called “Restoring Justice” forced me to, once again, confront “justice” language and try to think about what a Christian definition of “justice” might look like.
Some of these thoughts were still kicking around in the back of my mind when, as a part of my thesis research, I picked up a book by David A. deSilva called Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture (this book, by the way, is exceptional. It is both scholarly and easy to read [for those who don't have a background in biblical studies] and I think that it provides the lenses that are necessary for a more genuine — and more exciting! — read of the New Testament).
DeSilva's chapter on “Patronage and Reciprocity” is subtitled “The Social Context of Grace” and it is here that he provides a very interesting read on what the word “grace” would mean to those who lived during the times when the New Testament was written. However, in order to explore that point, I should probably explain what “patronage” is for those who don't know (I'll be summarising and simplifying deSilva).
The patronage that existed in the Greco-Roman culture was a system that was based upon the fact that access to goods was significantly limited. Most property, wealth, and goods were concentrated in the hands of the few and so one needed personal connections (rather than bureaucratic channels) in order to access those things. Thus, a “client” would go to a “patron” with a petition and, when that petition was granted, the client and patron would enter into a relationship of mutual exchange (reciprocity) wherein the patron would provide the client with the desired goods and the client would then do all that s/he could to enhance the fame and honour of the patron.
Now, where this begins to get intriguing is that it is precisely here, in this social context of patronage, that the language of “grace” must be properly understood. As deSilva says: “For the actual writers and readers of the New Testament… grace was not primarily a religious, as opposed to a secular, word.” In this context, grace actually has three layers of meaning:
(1) the word grace speaks of the generosity of the patron (e.g. “the patron was gracious”);
(2) the word grace also denotes the gift itself (e.g. “we have received grace upon grace”);
(3) the word also speaks of the response of the one who receives the gift (e.g. “we received the gift with gratitude”).
[In the Greek the relationship between these three examples may, perhaps, be more clear since the words employed — charis, charitas, and charin — all have the same root.]
Now, what is intriguing about this is that, when we keep definition (3) in mind, we come to realise that, as deSilva says, “grace must always be met with grace… there is no such thing as an isolated act of grace… To fail to return favor for favor is, in effect, to… destroy the beauty of the gracious act.”
Now, this already should get our wheels turning in terms of the whole grace vs. works debate that seems to persist in Christian circles, but instead of pursuing that thought, I want to continue to see how this relates to our understanding of justice.
Here is the bomb that deSilva drops:
“Gratitude toward one's patrons… was a prominent example in discussions of what it meant to live out the cardinal virtue of justice, a virtue defined as giving to each person his or her due.”
Now what is so shocking about this understanding of justice? Well, it requires us to undergo a fundamental paradigm shift. According to this understanding, justice then is not about ensuring that we receive what we are entitled to (i.e. our “human rights”). Rather, justice is living out the gratitude that is proper to those who are recipients of grace! Furthermore, since Christians are those who believe that they receive grace from a divine benefactor (God), justice could more concisely be defined as worship — and this should lead Christians to argue that any definition of justice that is not rooted here will be deficient. Suffice to say, this understanding of “justice” has significant implications for how we go about pursuing justice today.
By way of closing I would like to end with one more remark related to patronage. In speaking of the gratitude-as-loyalty that clients are to show to their patrons, deSilva notes that people can be clients of more than one patron, so long as those patrons are not at odds with one another. However, a person cannot be a client of patrons that are enemies or rivals because in order to by loyal and grateful to one, the client would have to be disloyal and ungrateful to the other. Thus deSilva writes the following:
“'No one can serve two masters' honorably in the context of these masters being at odds with one another, but if the masters are 'friends' or bound to each other by some other means, the client should be safe in receiving favors from both.”
The reference to “two masters” is, of course, a reference to Jesus' words in Mt 6. In light of deSilva's argument it seems that Jesus is making it clear that God and Mammon are two masters that are “at odds with one another.” God and Mammon are not friends, they are enemies, and one cannot serve both (and it should also be noted that Jesus makes it equally clear that one is already serving Mammon if one is simply collecting money!). This, I think, is a point that will be rejected by most middle-class Christians (liberal or conservative) who prefer to think of God and Mammon as friends that can both be served.

[B]oth Jesus and Paul are not so much trapped in a negation of global imperialism as engaged in establishing its positive alternative here below upon this earth.
~ John Dominic Crossan, In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom, 409.
In Part I of this series, I explored the idea of defining the Christian community as a “community of beggars.” I concluded that such a community cannot be sustained within the structures of capitalism and that Christians should, therefore, develop a political economics of “radical sharing and equally radical dependence.” Then, in Part II of this series, I continued to stress the need for Christians to move beyond capitalism. However, if we are to make that move, I suggested that we need to recover our genuinely Christian imagination, which is rooted in the hope that is inspired by the biblical narrative (and not rooted in the “realism” or “necessity” inspired by the narrative of capitalism). However, I also suggested that we have lost the ability to imagine a true alternative to capitalism because we have lost the will to live outside of the comforts that capitalism provides for us. Therefore, I concluded that we will only be able to imagine a genuine alternative to capitalism when we begin to embody the alternative that we are pursuing.
I would like to continue this series by exploring what an embodied alternative to capitalism might look like. What might a community of beggars look like in day-to-day life? How do “radical sharing” and “radical dependence” play out on street level?
However, before I do that, I would like to begin by suggesting that many of the answers to these questions are actually discovered “along the way.” By this I mean that we often spend too much time trying to find the most exact or ideal alternative to capitalism instead of beginning, step by step, to embody an alternative. Indeed, our pursuit of the ideal alternative often leaves us overwhelmed and hopelessly bogged down in the details, instead of leading us to action. However, this assertion needs to be prefaced in at least two ways.
First of all, recognising the ways in which our pursuit of ideals can lead to hopelessness or inaction should not lead us to the conclusion that serious reflection in inadvisable. Far from it. We need to think through things like Christianity and capitalism quite intently. The problem arises when we look to solve all the problems involved before we act. Contemplation can lead to great insight in one area and not in another area. In that case, we need to act upon the insight we gain, with the hope that that action will then open the door for insight into other (as of yet) puzzling areas. Thus, we are always to be “contemplatives in action.”
Secondly, recognising that we will not be able to implement the ideal result from the get-go, should not lead us to the sort of resignation that is satisfied with doing “just a bit more” than we were doing before. This, I fear, is part of the problem with the approach that people like Bono and Oprah take to charity. Bono and Oprah live lives that are marked by massive amounts of luxury, but they also regularly advocate for, or donate to, some sort of charitable cause. The implicit message in this is that I can have my cake and eat it too — i.e. I don't have to feel guilty about living opulently so long as I give just a little more to charity. That we cannot yet attain the ideal should not lead us to settle for less. Rather, we should be involved in an ongoing pursuit of that which is more ideal than what we have now. As with the rest of life, this means employing the metaphor of “journey.” Donating a little more to charity may be a good step on the way, but it is only one step along the way (and probably a small and introductory one), it is not the end-point. Thus, we need to learn to affirm each step, while also challenging ourselves and others to continue on the way.
Given this opening proviso, I would now like to suggest what I believe to be are a few good steps in the development of a Christian alternative to capitalism. Moving beyond mere criticisms, I would like to propose a Christian political economics of sharing (nonsensical charity) and dependence (nonsensical vulnerability).