Soren and I chat about Bushonomics

A Philosophy of Religion class I once took (yes, my degree is in philosophy, which is why you'll see so much of it on these pages) had us reading Kierkegaard, and the professor remarked in jest that "Reading Kierkegaard is a hazard to your faith, you'll either head off towards the straits of fundamentalism or veer left toward liberalization, but any way you go you'll doubt for a while first. " I certainly didn't need to veer at all to become a liberal, but Kierkegaard nonetheless became one of my favorite thinkers, mostly because he's so often eminently reasonable when discussing the Church, and few philosophers achieve that (fond though I am of Descartes, he was wrong about God).

The following quotes Kierkegaard, translated out of the Danish, of course. I know it's long, but it's worth bearing with the passage, because it's prescient of what we see the Republicans doing in our economic policy today, and I'll talk later about how it speaks to their motivations:

Christ was not making a historical observation when he declared: The gospel is preached to the poor. The accent is on the gospel, that the gospel is for the poor. Here the word “poor” does not simply mean poverty but all who suffer, are unfortunate, wretched, wronged, oppressed, crippled, lame, leprous, demonic. The gospel is preached to them, that is, the gospel is for them. The gospel is good news for them. What good news? Not: money, health, status, and so on — no, this is not Christianity.

No, for the poor the gospel is the good news because to be unfortunate in this world (in such a way that one is abandoned by human sympathy, and the worldly zest for life even cruelly tries to make one’s misfortune into guilt) is a sign of God’s nearness. So it was originally; this is the gospel in the New Testament. It is preached for the poor, and it is preached by the poor who, if they in other respects were not suffering, would eventually suffer by proclaiming the gospel; since suffering is inseparable from following Christ, from telling the truth.

But soon there came a change. When preaching the gospel became a livelihood, even a lush livelihood, then the gospel became good news for the rich and for the mighty. For how else was the preacher to acquire and secure rank and dignity unless Christianity secured the best for all? Christianity thus ceased to be glad tidings for those who suffer, a message of hope that transfigures suffering into joy, but a guarantee for the enjoyment of life intensified and secured by by the hope of eternity.

The gospel no longer benefits the poor essentially. In fact, Christianity has now even become a downright injustice to those who suffer (although we are not always conscious of this, and certainly unwilling to admit to it). Today the gospel is preached to the rich, the powerful, who have discovered it to be advantageous. We are right back again to the very state original Christianity wanted to oppose. The rich and powerful not only get to keep everything, but their success becomes the mark of their piety, the sign of their relationship to God. And this prompts the old atrocity again — namely, the idea that the unfortunate, the poor are to blame for their condition; that it is because they are not pious enough, are not true Christians, that they are poor, whereas the rich have not only pleasure but piety as well. This is supposed to be Christianity. Compare it with the New Testament, and you will see that this is as far from that as possible.

It helps, at this juncture, to observe that in the Hebrew, the word 'poor' does not mean 'making very little money, but nonetheless living a sustainable existence'. It means something more extreme, something akin to our 'destitute'. It means living on the very brink of starvation, in a condition where the person literally has no resources. Every time Jesus says "Blessed are the poor", he doesn't mean the people with small houses who can't afford more than one used car, he means the people under bridges and in sewers.

That said, what is Soren saying to us about our current economic situation? Well, one might flippantly quip that Bush is attempting to help America by getting as many people into that 'blessed' condition as possible, but I think that's disrespect to the text by not considering its points carefully enough. Soren starts out by observing that Christ was making a historical observation, one which is no longer true. For two millenia, the gospel has not been preached by the poor for the poor, but by the rich and educated for everyone else. The Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination in the world today, is also the wealthiest organization in the world today.

The interesting thing about Christianity is that in Christ's time, it had no political power, and it could not be foreseen to gain political power. The apostles had no way of knowing that one day their words would guide nations, because they were preaching to an audience that was the least nation-guiding bunch available: the people with no money and no power.

Let's combine this fact with one other: there are very cogent arguments from across the denominational and theological spectrum that Christ was voluntarily limited in his power. There is good evidence in the gospels that Christ gave up the 'omnis' of God (omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience) in order to become fully human. A number of theologians have claimed that the validity of Christ's sacrifice rests on this interpretation of Christ's power: he was the son of God, he was one part of a tripartite Deity, but he did not have the full power of God.

Take those two facts together: Christ was preaching to the poorest of the poor, in a time when they could not have been humanly foreseen to gain political power; and Christ was God in a voluntarily limited form and did not have the full omniscience of God. The implication of those two facts combined is that the Gospels were never meant to govern a nation. They were never intended as prescriptions for political power or how to use it. There is a reason that the gospels are so intensely focused on personal faith, and on how God can impact individuals: they were never meant for the kind of bureaucracy and power plays that now permeate organized religion. Bush tries to run a country based on the teachings of a book that was intended as a moral guide to life person by person, not collectively.

What does this change in purpose accomplish? Soren lays it out: the poor get blamed again for their condition, and they gain no aid from the faith that was established in their name. Looks like a description of Bush-economics to me. Tax-breaks that favor the wealthy, cuts to welfare programs, an insistence on private health care (which the poor cannot afford), etc are all evidence of an attitude that if you are poor, it is your fault. You are not saving enough, not working hard enough, not blessed enough by God to deserve the benefits of being American (the 'or of being Christian' is implied but not explicit). When you divorce the purpose of scripture from the teachings of scripture, what you gain is not a wider application of the Word, it's a perversion of everything that was said in the first place.