Nothing New Under The Sun...

I continue to be amazed at the insight and wisdom of the author of Ecclisiastes when he observed that there is nothing new under the sun. This time, the surprise was not a pleasant one.

One of the thrusts of the postmodern world is a growing awareness and desire for community, as well as questioning of the individualistic capitalism that drives the globalization of the world’s economies. Surprisingly, this is not new. Defenders of slavery in the antebellum South did, according to Mark Noll’s book “The Civil War as a Theological Crisis,” in fact, “raise serious questions from Scripture about the moral order of an individualistic and profit-mad economy which they saw as the North’s aggressive alternative to a slave order. In Eugene Genovese’s words, the threat was of ‘a materialistic, marketplace society that promoted competitive individualism and worshiped Mammon’… In that postbellum climate, Southern Christian defenses of patriarchal communalism were fatally compromised by their association with slavery…” (pp 52-53).

Interesting twist on my desires for communalism and less materialism. A tainted desire? I don’t think so. But as Noll points out, war fatigue cut short the theological debates about economic systems which should have been natural at the time of the Civil War. “The result was theological weakness in the face of pressing economic circumstances: while there was a heightened capacity to produce wealth, there was also a heightened capacity to produce alienation and vast economic inequality. These issues were eventually addressed practically by pietists like the Salvation Army and theoretically by leaders of the Social Gospel, yet theological incoherence in the face of modern economic realities has remained a major problem for Christian thinking ever since the Civil War” (pp 53-54).

That sounds like a resounding call to the emerging theologians to continue tackling a growing interest of mine, the theology of economics. May thoughtful Christians everywhere rise up to this challenge.