Long - Miles - Routledge Companion to Christian Ethics

D. Stephen Long, Rebekah L. Miles - Routledge Companion to Christian Ethics

New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. – 550 p.

ISBN: 978-0-367-36287-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-37916-6 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-34508-1 (ebk)

Christian Ethics brings together two different but related disciplines. The first is contemplative or theoretical, asking what are the beliefs or doctrines that characterize Christianity. Systematic, dogmatic, or constructive theology addresses this concern. The second is practical, asking what are the ethical practices that attend its teachings. It is referred to as Christian Ethics or Moral Theology. It presumes the work accomplished by the first more theoretical discipline and asks what difference Christianity makes for everyday life. The movement between the theoretical and practical aspects is not, however, one way, as if ethics is simply the application of doctrine to life. Theory is a practice, and practice always assumes theory. Doctrine and life are mutually informing. Rowan Williams puts the relationship between them well when he writes, “the language of doctrine holds together a set of intractably complex questions in a way that offers a coherent context for human living” (Williams 2018, p. xi). Doctrine is never for the purpose of mere speculation; it provides a context for life. Likewise, living within that context both clarifies and revises doctrine. Professing faith in God is an action that brings with it other actions.

This insistence on the unity of Christian doctrine and ethics is both a broad claim consistent with our shared catholic tradition while also emerging from the particular Wesleyan heritage of the volume’s two co-editors. Methodist denominations include moral rules for behavior within their doctrinal statements. When we were each ordained as elders and voted into clergy membership, we promised to adhere to formal doctrinal standards and the shared General Rules of moral living and to strive to be made perfect in love. For Wesley and Wesleyans, there is no sharp distinction between theology and the moral life. Indeed, Wesleyans understand the moral life to be made possible by our participation in the Holy Trinity, in the very life of God (Miles 2010, pp. 208–209). This helps make sense of why we organized a book on Christian Ethics around the three headings of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Of course, our insistence on the integration of theology and ethics is not only a part of our particular Wesleyan heritage but also of the broader Christian tradition.

Because of the connection between doctrine and life, the following work takes the structure of the Nicene Creed. The Creed does not say everything that needs to be said about what it means to be Christian; for instance, it was never supposed to replace Scripture. But it assists doing well one core practice of the Christian life that will then require further elaborations of doctrine and life: Christians worship Jesus without confusing divinity and humanity. This worship must occur faithful to Jewish Torah that forbids worshiping creatures, and this is not easily accomplished. After all, Jesus is a creature. The Creed helps make sense of this core practice through the two great mysteries: the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. Christians affirm with Jews and Muslims that God is One. Language is used to describe that oneness such as “essence” or “substance.” They also affirm that the One God is revealed in three persons: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This language does not solve a puzzle but expresses a mystery. It is an answer to the question: “Who is this God that Christians worship?,” but the answer is more like a riddle than a logical proposition. For instance, Christian theology claims that the Father is the essence of God, the Son is the essence of God, the Spirit is the essence of God, and the Father, Son, and Spirit together are the essence of God, and yet God has only one essence.

The second great mystery of Christian faith is found in the Incarnation. The second person of the Trinity, the Son, became fully human, born of the virgin Mary. The Son is fully human and fully divine but one person or one acting subject. When the Son acts, or is acted upon, divinity and humanity act or are acted upon together. This mystery leads to paradoxical statements such as in giving birth to Jesus Mary gives birth to God, who of course cannot be born. In Jesus’s suffering and dying on the cross, the impassible, eternal God suffers and dies. Without the mystery of the incarnation, these paradoxical statements would be absurd. The Holy Spirit brings wisdom, gives life to all creatures, reveals the Son, guides his ongoing mission, infuses faith, hope, and charity, and speaks through prophets and wise persons. She is both the object of worship and the one in whom worship is made possible. These two mysteries, as the first chapter below suggests, directly bear on Christian practical reasoning. In fact, to some extent, every chapter that follows draws on, or assumes, these two mysteries in order to illustrate ethical issues.

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Socialism. Sabbath, Jubilee, and Christian Socialism

Joshua Davis

DOI: 10.4324/9780429345081-37

Their land is filled with idols;

they bow down to the work of their hands,

to what their own fingers have made.

Isaiah 2:8

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties…The mystical character of commodities does not originate…in their use value.

Marx, Capital

Introduction

The ethical basis for Christian socialism is the mission of gospel. That mission is to announce that the crucified Jesus has overcome all powers of alienation and death and continues, even beyond death, to bring all things into God’s peace. Of course, this raises a series of questions about what Christian socialism means and what it is. Chief among them being, does Christian socialism make the Gospel into a political project? What is Christian about Christian socialism; is it a particular kind of socialism? Do Christian socialists think Christians ought to support any form of socialism, or that the only valid socialism is a Christian one? If so, which is the right Christian socialism? How can a Christian support socialism after all the totalitarian terrors committed by socialist states? And so on.

These questions and others like them are important. However, much of the discomfort that many of these questions express can be addressed by noting that Christian socialists do not make socialism synonymous with the gospel. When they say that the gospel itself is the basis for Christian socialism, they mean that the responsibility to proclaim the gospel under the conditions of capitalism obliges Christians to embrace an anti-capitalist political project and to participate in the struggle to create democratic social relations that are not mediated by commodities. The first claim Christian socialists make is that being a disciple of Jesus is incompatible with capitalism. Just as early Christians understood they must resist Rome’s imperial cult, so twenty-first-century Christians must resist capitalism. Since the lives of Christians witnesses to who God is, the veracity of the gospel is inseparable from the material, social relations that Christians share and make real. The Christian socialist maintains that the faithful proclamation of the gospel will give rise to a form of social mutuality that is incompatible with capitalist society and points beyond it. Christian socialists believe, in other words, being a Christian under capitalism means being revolutionary.

Many may give different reasons or analyses for why, as Christians, they support socialist politics. In this essay, I will focus only on why the ethics of Christian socialism must go beyond moral objections to capitalist individualism and social competition, and why attempts to ground Christian socialism in a theological genealogy of modernity are inadequate and contradictory. I will argue that the ethical grounding for Christian socialism lies first in understanding capitalism as a social whole, not as one way of ordering economic production and distribution. For the Christian socialist this is of the utmost importance because it means that no aspect of the Christian life is outside of capitalist social relations. A Christian ethics that cannot account for itself in terms of capitalist society cannot exercise its moral responsibility to witness to the gospel. The first section of the essay, then, will set out what capitalism as a social form means. The remainder of the essay will give a scriptural basis for grounding Christian socialism in the mission of the gospel.

Capital Is Your God: Capitalist Society, Capitalist Religion

Despite the authoritative and prophetic invective Christians have levied at capitalist individualism, greed, and social competition, they have been too often content with bromides rather than organizing for social transformation. Many Christians, and not all of them on the left, have the strong conviction that capitalism is evil. But most of these Christians don’t know they don’t know why.

Most Christians, like most people, think that capitalism is an arrangement of producing goods and distributing them. Arguments about capitalism tend to focus on whether that arrangement is or is not consistent with human nature and is or is not a superior way of producing wealth. Far less consideration is given in these debates to one of the most peculiar aspects of capitalism, which became special focus of the Frankfurt School, which is its tendency to turn even opposition to capitalism into an instrument of its expansion. Marx, too, was aware of this, noting in the Grundrisse that the categories of political economy are not just objective facts because they also “express what is given, in the head as well as in reality, …the forms of being, the determinations of existence…of this specific society” (Marx 1993, p. 106). If true, this is a matter of crucial concern to Christians, since it means that there are forms of Christian life and theology that are unrecognized forms of capitalism. In other words, a Christian critique of capitalism must be an immanent critique of the specifically metaphysical and theological dimensions of capitalism that are at work within Christian life and theology.

It will surprise many theologians that Marx, not Weber, has given the most astute assessment of capitalism’s theological dimension. Weber’s claims about Protestant theology and capitalism are not at all what the bowdlerized version of his argument that circulates in theology frame them to be—and the same is true of Marx’s materialism. Theologians tend to understand Marx’s critique of capitalism as an ontological claim that juxtaposes metaphysical materialism to idealism. Capital is most often read, by both adherents and detractors, as outlining Marx’s vision of political economy in opposition to others, like Smith, Malthus, or Ricardo. But, as the subtitle of the work (“a critique of political economy”) indicates, his purpose is to understand classical political economy on its own terms. He says in the Economic Manuscripts of 1844, we must begin “with the premises of [classical] political economy” to show “on the basis of political economy itself” that it leads to insuperable contradictions (Marx 1978, p. 70). Capital, then, is not prescribing a political economy based on dialectical materialism, but unfolding a Socratic inquiry: he begins with what is most self-evident about capitalist economic relations, interrogates them, reveals that they are not as they appear, and thereby makes true understanding of them possible. Crucially, the metaphysical, religious, and theological concepts that emerge from this inquiry belong to capitalism itself and are not intended to be the standpoint of his critique.

Christian socialists can learn much from Marx’s approach. If Marx is right to proceed this way, then it means that any critique of capitalism that is levied from a presumed foothold outside of it—e.g., the church and its practices—will only produce an illusion. It will be unable to grasp how its own position is a form of capitalist social life. Its purported opposition to capitalism, then, will only reinforce capitalist society. Unfortunately, most current theological critiques of capitalism lack this self-reflexivity, but understanding the key concepts of Marx’s analysis can serve as a necessary corrective.

Marx locates the source of capitalism’s phantasmagoric aspect in the characteristics of capitalist commodities. He thinks that analyzing the commodity will unlock the whole structure of capitalism, because it is “a form of social relations,” not just an object to be sold and bought, but a structure of subjectivity that circulates throughout culture and religion, determining the practices and ideas of both (Postone 2008, p. 131). Marx is being quite literal when he says the commodity “appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood,” but is “in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties…The mystical character of commodities does not originate…in their use value” (Marx 1992, pp. 163, 164).

Commodities, of course, are not unique to capitalism, but they assume a role of social mediation in capitalism that is utterly unique. When we buy a car, meal, or university education that exchange appears straightforward, as a direct social relation between two persons (subjects) who are trading useful things (objects) to meet their human needs. When we look closer, though, the reality is quite bizarre. We assume that the commodities, as objects, are mediating the relations between the persons, that there is a real relation between persons underneath this exchange of objects. But Marx uses the religious language of “fetish” to describe what is really happening what is really happening. We are misrecognizing, he says, a material relation to one another as a real social relation, and vice versa. Consequently, commodities do a distinctively religio-ous work in capitalist society, which is that of binding us together. The most mundane errands become capitalist rituals and spiritual practices. That ritual function, though, is hidden within the commodity’s fetish character. What appears as the most “material” of acts—that of acquiring useful goods—bears a hidden and most spiritual significance. The spiritual reality that capitalist society produces is one that compels us to use each other as objects for meeting our needs, to use them as the means to our own ends. We are bound together in such a way that we can only live by obtaining what other people produce.

We must be clear that this reality is not an illusion. Understanding the inversion of social and material relations in capitalism cannot change it. Once we realize that we are all treating each other as the means to own ends, we cannot then start treating each other with the dignity we are owed. On the contrary, except in those domains that are considered “private,” capitalist social relations only truly exist between commodities (see Arruzza et al. 2019). Capitalist society compels us to treat others are things, to “thing-ify” (reify) them, and to endow commodities with “personhood,” as bearers of social subjectivity. Note that a commodity does not represent some “true” personhood, but is itself the bearer of “personhood,” “subjectivity,” and personal agency within capitalist society. The force of this aspect of the commodity, and its profound theological implications, will be discussed below in relation to social value.

This reification of persons and personification of things is not a universal human condition. It emerged with capitalism. Ancient Rome only recognized specific human beings as persons (persona), and they were those who legally owned property. All other humans were things (res), owned by a person. Capitalist society, though, grants personhood to everyone in an ideal, legal sense, while compelling us in reality to treat everyone other than us as things. George Romero’s films Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead capture this well. While the zombies of those films at first appear as terrifying portraits of de-personalized (reified) humans, what gradually emerges as far more dreadful is the vivification of the unliving. The capitalist spirit that possesses us is one that animates the inanimate, personifies the impersonal, and ensouls the soulless.

Christians cannot be neutral about the role of commodities in capitalist society. In a very real sense, they are sacraments. To adapt Augustine: commodities are the outward and visible signs of an invisible, spiritual value that is realized ex opere operato. Its spiritual value is not at all dependent on the buyer’s or seller’s devotion or resistance to capitalism, private property, or markets, but is realized by participation in commodity exchange alone. Hence, ethical exhortations to “buy local” or more ontological appeals to the unleashing of our natural desire for God are irrelevant.

And it is in relation to desire that the role of labor comes into view. Several scholars have noted that Marx understands labor in very different terms in his later work than traditional Marxism has recognized. For example, he notes in the Grundrisse:

Labour seems a quite simple category. The conception of labour in this general form—as labour as such—is also immeasurably old. Nevertheless, when it is economically conceived in this simplicity, ‘labour’ is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction.

(Marx 1993, p. 103)

By “simple,” Marx means that capitalism classifies qualitatively different human activities (e.g., teaching, construction, and painting) as a singular, quantifiable category called “labor.” As Postone notes, this idea of quantifiable labor “constitutes a new form of interdependence, where people do not consume what they produce, but where, nevertheless, their own labour or labour-products function as a …means of obtaining the products of others” (Postone 2012, p. 336).

As a single, uniform social category, labor becomes what Simmel and Sohn-Rethel called a “real abstraction,” a rational principal that arises from human labor but comes to compel and dominate it. As Marx puts it, when a worker’s work is realized by society as a whole, then simultaneously it is a “loss of reality for the workers,” an “object-bondage” (Marx 1978, p. 71). The means by which society ascribes personhood to a person (labor) is also the means of her increasing estrangement (reified) from everyone else. This inverse correlation of labor’s social significance to personal alienation is the basis for the fetishism of the commodity. It also explains why communist states, like the Soviet Union and China, which change only the forms of distribution and do not overcome the commodity form itself, become totalitarian. They are simply forms of state capitalism, as Friedrich Pollock argued, because the state is the only true capitalist person (Pollock 1982, pp. 71–94).

Most Christian critiques of capitalism fail to grasp this aspect of labor, and instead celebrate it for its creativity (poesis) and expression of our desire for God. Christian critics of capitalism, like John Milbank, argue that capitalism perverts and parodies this aspect of human poesis by binding it to bureaucratized, technological production—Blake’s “satanic mills”—rather than the virtues of practiced craft (Milbank 2003, pp. 199, 162–86). But the concrete, qualitative dimension of capitalist labor does not exist outside the circuit of its abstract quantifiability. What we understand as labor’s “concrete” dimension is simply the reified dimension of its social role as a commodity. It is the fetish form of labor itself taht leads us to think that its reified concreteness is its precommodified, natural form, uncontaminated by industrial production. Thus, celebrating labor’s concreteness over against industrial production is merely clinging to the illusion of what appears pure about the commodity. Even when these forms of analyzing capitalism adopt the name “socialist,” it is inevitable that they will take on a reactionary hue, such as nationalism, fascism, and certain forms of populism. There is a line dividing Wendell Berry from Heidegger, but it is thin. Christian socialists must learn, by astute critical analysis, to avoid both state capitalism and reactionary socialism, each of which confuse emancipation with the superintendence of our own chains.

It is important to note further that the commodity’s value, its “spiritual” significance for society (Geist), does not reside in its usefulness for meeting needs. A commodity’s value is made by labor. It is the outward and visible sign of the social significance of labor, which is its value. Commodities carry within them the simplified, “congealed labor” that forms the basis of their exchange with one another (Marx 1992, p. 128). Their sacramental role is to bind society together by mediating this human labor—or, more precisely, mediating the social significance, the social value, of labor as the “means of obtaining the products of others.”

Capital is this spirit. It is the subjective, social, and spiritual meaning that circulates through society. This spirit’s name is Legion— a soulless agent, a depersonalized subject. Marx calls it “self-valorizing”:

It is constantly changing from one form into the other without becoming lost in this movement; it thus transforms itself into an automatic subject…[V]alue is here the subject of a process in which…it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus-value from itself…and thus valorizes itself independently. For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus value is its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs.

…[I]t suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own…It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value, just as God the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son, although both are…in fact one single person…

(Marx 1992, pp. 255–256)

Once capital arises, labor adds value to value. From that point, it can reproduce itself. Capital compels society to meet its needs, even at the expense of those who produce it. Like Skynet from the Terminator films, humans create capital, yet it takes on a life of its own, turning on its creators and hunting them with ruthless, impersonal precision.

Indeed, capitalism is a theology.

The commodity is our sacrament. Labor is our worship. Capital is our god.

Against Idolatry: A Socialist Christian Politics of Sabbath and Jubilee

The long and diverse tradition of Christian socialism waned in the later part of the twentieth century. It was kept alive in the US, however, by numerous representatives, like Cornel West, Gary Dorrien, Rosemary Ruether, and Dorothy Sölle, among many others. “Tradition” is a peculiar word to describe what these figures share, since no one of the figures or groups ever claimed to represent the “true” Christian socialism. So, it is not a tradition that is constituted by a shared set of ideas about what capitalism or even socialism is. Quite the contrary, the group to which Christian socialists claim to belong is one that includes such theological and ecclesiological figures as Gustavo Gutierrez and Charles Sheldon, Martin Luther King and Christoph Blumhardt, Walter Rauschenbusch and Karl Barth, Vida Scudder and Paul Tillich, Leonardo Boff and Kenneth Leech. Whether it is leading a base community in Peru, organizing civil disobedience during the march on Birmingham, running for elected office as a member of the SPD, or organizing industrial workers in London, what Christian socialists share is not theological continuity but the conviction that their responsibility to live and preach the gospel means they are committed to concrete practices of social transformation and political struggle.

Still, a renewal of Christian socialism cannot mean donning “the slogans and costumes” of the past but must “draw its poetry…only from the future” (Marx 1978, pp. 595, 597). Capitalism has changed in significant ways, even in the twenty-first century alone, much more so since the birth of Christian socialism. Reviving the practice of Christian socialism will most definitely mean helping Christians better to understand the far-reaching complexity of the issues that capitalism raises for Christian social ethics, morality, and spiritual practice today. But it will be neither a renewal of Christian socialism nor worthwhile as Christian ethics if it fails to organize Christians for participation in anti-capitalist politics and to nurture their formation of noncommodified social relations that reflect the truth of the gospel.

Christian socialist practice, then, must take aim at the heart of capitalism. This means rooting out the commodity’s place in capitalist society. Doing so will require Christians to recuperate a social and material practice of their faith that capitalism, in very specific ways, occludes. It is, however, the practice of faith that Scripture teaches is characteristic of those who belong to the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, and of the social life they share with one another and God. Given the understanding of capitalism as a social whole developed above, we should focus on those aspects of Scripture that speak directly to the question of creative human work and the peculiar social character of God’s people. So, we begin with Sabbath and Jubilee traditions, and we will look at their central place in the Gospels’ presentation of Jesus’ mission.

The rationales for Israel’s Sabbath and Jubilee traditions are given in several places in Scripture. While those rationales are different in key ways, those differences work together to reinforce key theological themes. The first Sabbath commandment is given to Israel in Exodus 16:22–30, and it is related to the task of gathering the manna on which they survive while wandering in the desert. They may gather it for six days, God says, but on the seventh, they must rest. This rest creates for Israel a peculiar experience of time as sacred, which for a nomadic people stands in contrast to experiences of sacred space. In addition to forming their experience of time, the commandment is also a gift from God, a blessing. Pharoah’s command was to work, and it was a curse: it takes time away. God’s command is to rest, is a blessing: it gives time to them.

Later, in Exodus 20:8–11, the Sabbath commandment is connected to God’s work of creating. God created everything in six days, then rested on the seventh. God’s rest sanctifies this day, and so the people who belong to this God must keep it holy by resting too. Note how peculiar it likely seems to us that God’s rest, not God’s creativity, sanctifies the day. Human beings are not closest to God, according to Scripture, in their creative work, but in their rest and delight in what they have done. The act of worship that preserves the day’s sanctity is to stop work and share God’s rest.

Exodus 31:12–18 makes clear that keeping the Sabbath not only preserves the day’s holiness but makes Israel’s social life holy. The commandment to stop laboring on the Sabbath means, positively, that the spiritual significance of Israel’s social life comes from sharing in God’s rest, delight, repose (shalom)—the true sign of holiness and intimacy with God. Again, it is their rest, not the work, that does this. Rest is not done for the sake of work. Work is done for the sake of rest. The tradition of the Thirty-Nine Melachot (“forms of work”) makes this explicit (Mishnah Shabbat 7:2). It recognizes that work is essential to meeting human needs. Indeed, creative human work is precisely the way that humans reflect God’s image (Gen 1:26). Yet, it is just this kind of creative work the Sabbath prohibits: no acts of self-preservation (baking bread, making clothes, writing, and building shelter) or those involved in maintaining the Tabernacle (making paint, coverings, skins, and the Tabernacle itself), a microcosm of society, are allowed. As Heschel says, the practice of the Sabbath communicates that “the solution to mankind’s most vexing problem will not be by renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence from it” (Heschel 2005, p. 28).

Sabbath prohibitions against creative work are also bound up with the prohibition of idols As with Pharoah, idols require work. Isaiah 2:8, which is the epigraph for this essay, captures well this connection between labor and idolatry: “they bow down to the work of their hands, /to what their fingers have made.” The Wisdom of Solomon makes the point even more forcefully:

But miserable, with their hopes set on dead things, are those/who give the name ‘gods’ to the works of human hands…/For health he appeals to a thing that is weak;/for life he prays to a thing that is dead;/…he asks strength of a thing whose hands have no strength.

(13:10–13; 17–19)

Therefore, Israel’s prophets constantly equate it not only with adultery and betrayal but also with stupidity (Fowl 2019, p. 9). Redemption from slavery is deliverance from idolatry; return to idols is self-enslavement. Hence, the monarchy is such a source of ambivalence for Israel, as Samuel made plain. Brueggemann consistently notes that the prohibition of idolatry applies to the monarchy, which becomes more and more like Pharoah’s rule (see Brueggemann 1988). Idolatry is a fetish form, just as Marx analyzes it in capitalism: the idol is exactly the product of human work that it appears to be, but it is misrecognized as a spiritual rather than material relation. The same is true of Pharoah and Caesar, who are quite literally the gods they appear to be, because gods are nothing more than Pharaohs and Caesars. All monarchs (Pharaohs and Caesars), just like all idols, cannot exist without your work. This is the force of McCabe’s claim that the great Hebrew insight is that God is not a god (McCabe 2005, p. 59). The true God wants nothing from you, only to give you rest.

So, because all of Israel belongs to the God of the Sabbath, Leviticus extends this rest to every aspect of their society by introducing Sabbath years, jubilees (see Leviticus 25:8–10). In these sabbath years, everyone and everything in Israel’s society must be emancipated, or “released” (דרוֹר, deror) from bondage. Israel’s weekly practice of rest, itself an economic practice, radiates out across Israelite society and its passage of time. The entire chapter of Leviticus 25 makes clear that the Jubilee release applies to the land (agricultural fields, vineyards), hired and indentured servants, livestock, and even wild animals (25:1–7). The social effects of lost access to productive land, mounting debt, poverty (25:24–28), lost homes (24:29), and immigration (25:47) are all redeemed during these years.

Similarly, the entirety of Exodus 23 is focused on Israel’s responsibilities to the most vulnerable of society. “Strangers” are not to be oppressed (23:9). Justice for the poor is demanded (23:6). As with Leviticus 25, all indentured servants and farmland must be emancipated after six years. The produce growing on resting land belongs to the poor. Deuteronomy 15 sets out similar laws regarding: debt forgiveness (15:1–6), lending to the poor (15:7–11), and releasing servants (15:12–18). The ground for these practices is Israel’s experience of living as enslaved refugees in Egypt: “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Ex 23:9). And again: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you; for this reason, I lay this command upon you today” (Deut 15:15).

Just as keeping the Sabbath makes Israel a holy people, the Jubilee year ensures that this holiness touches all aspects of Israel’s political and economic life. No person, animal, or even the land may be worked without rest. All unpaid debts must be forgiven. No person, family, or land may be indentured in perpetuity. And the reason is because of who the true God is: “…the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Lv 25:23). The social life of those who belong to the God of the Sabbath must reflect that God’s character.

Luke and Matthew both record that Jesus’ ministry began in Nazareth by reading a text from Third Isaiah (Isa 61:1–2) for which these Sabbath and Jubilee laws are the immediate background (Luke 4:18–19; 7:18–23 and Matt 11:2–6):

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,

because the LORD has anointed me;

he has sent me to bring good news [בָּשַׂר, bśr] to the oppressed,

to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty [דרוֹר, deror] to the captives,

and release to the prisoners;

2to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor,

and the day of vengeance of our God;

to comfort all who mourn;…

Third Isaiah is here appointed to announce God’s decree of eschatological Jubilee emancipation. Ringe comments on this passage, noting the importance of its connection to the Sabbath and Jubilee traditions:

Throughout the history of Israel, from the early sabbath-year laws in the Covenant Code to the interpretations of the late Second Temple period, traditions associated with the Jubilee appear to affirm …that the structures of economic and social life must embody the people’s affirmation of God’s sovereignty. In other words, God’s reign and humankind’s liberation go hand in hand.

(Ringe 1985, p. 32)

When Luke 4:18–19 records Jesus reading Isaiah 61:1–2 in Nazareth and then declaring it fulfilled, the purpose is to identify Jesus’ mission with this announcement (“good news,” bśr) of God’s emancipatory decree (“release,” deror). Luke even underscores its emancipatory emphasis by interpolating a part of Isaiah 58:6 (“to set the oppressed free”) into the passage, a verse that makes explicit that what God wants from religious practice is to “loose the chains of injustice,” “set the oppressed free, and “break every yoke” of oppression. It is a passage that equates God’s sovereignty in Israel during exile with God’s eschatological sovereignty over creation. Where the Sabbath makes God’s rest available to the worker and her family and the Jubilee gives all aspects of Israel’s society a share of that rest, Third Isaiah extends that rest to all nations and creation. “Let my people go!” God says to Pharoah (Ex 7:16). By identifying himself with this announcement, Jesus is the emissary of God’s cosmic Jubilee: emancipation from bondage and rest for all (Ringe 1985, pp. 38, 71).

Isaiah 61 is so significant to Luke and Matthew that they record him repeating it in reply to the Baptist’s question whether he is the “one who is to come.” Jesus’ response is simply to point to what is happening: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them” (Luke 7:22; cf. Matt 11:5). Jesus is saying that these are divine acts of cosmic redemption, of release. We may be tempted to view this, like Bloch, as an example of the emancipatory power of the utopian imagination. But it is very significant that, Jesus does not appeal to their utopian imaginations, but to the reality of their experience. When he quotes Isaiah to the Baptist, it is to say that whether he is or is not the one they are waiting for—just like when God replies to Moses’ request for a name before confronting Pharoah—it will be verified or falsified by what happens. All Jesus can say is, just like Isaiah said, the captives are freed, the hungry eat, the poor are released, the lame walk, and the blind see. These are eschatological actions in the sense that they are apocalyptic, tangible, material realities that mark the transition from one aeon to another (Martyn 1997, pp. 89–110).

As tangible realities, they have direct economic implications. God’s eschatological Jubilee is an economy of release, of forgiveness, not one of debt and obligation (Ringe 1985, p. 79). A growing body of scholars argues that a central aspect of Jesus’ ministry is a response to the prozbul exception for the Jubilee-year release of debts and may have been a direct protest against it (Hudson 2018, pp. 220–22, 224–227). The prozbul was a clause included in a borrower’s contract that waived any rights to recoup, during Jubilee years, whatever debt had been incurred (Oakman 2014, pp. 24–33; Hudson 2018, p. 221). Rabbi Hillel had instituted the prozbul, at least in part, to ensure that loans remained available to those who needed them as a Jubilee year approached (Oakman 2014, p. 24). But as the practice of including the prozbul in debt contracts became common in Roman Palestine, Israel’s social life became indistinguishable from those of Rome’s (Hudson 2018, p. 221) and led to a condition of debt escalation, with a growing class of people who had no access to the means of subsistence (Oakman 2014, pp. 30–33).

The Lord’s Prayer, then, is the heart of the practice of Christian socialism. Ringe notes that the prayer can only be understood as a Jubilee prayer (Ringe 1985, pp. 81–84). Oakman says it is a peculiarly “this-worldly” eschatological prayer that “hopes for ultimate and final changes in human affairs and conditions” and “is surprisingly more concerned with specific problems and human welfare in the here and now than might have been suspected” (Oakman 2014, pp. 89–90). It is a protest prayer, he says, against the social problems caused by debt and hunger (Oakman 2014, p. 90). It envisions not just a time in which God’s power of release is exercised only when debts spiral out of control, but in which that power is the very foundation for all social life. This is what Jesus means by God’s reign, which he says his disciples should pray for. It is the power that is at work in his mission and ministry.

It is on this point that Jesus’ cross is decisive. The crucifixion appears to falsify the claim to fulfill Isaiah 61:1–2. As Paul says in Galatians 3:13, referencing Deuteronomy 21:23, “cursed is anyone hung on a tree.” If the cross displays the divinity of the empire, which is what Rome takes it to be, then the cross is a devastating reversal of the Exodus and a mockery of the God of the Sabbath and Jubilee. But that the cross is the fetish form of Roman imperial power is shown in what Jesus says about those responsible for his crucifixion: they “don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:24). The cross is, indeed, the manifestation of a god’s power, propped up by and in absolute dependence on the time, labor, and life it robs from the living. It reveals what is true about all gods and monarchs, all idols, that the only power they wield is death. They do not compare to Israel’s God, the One from Whom Jesus comes, who creates life, blesses with time, and commands rest. And as Paul reports Jesus saying to him in 2 Corinthians 12:9, his mission is verified, fulfilled in the fact that the “power [of creation/rest/release]…is made perfect in weakness.” Jesus’ faithfulness to his mission in the cross is identical to God’s act of releasing all things from the time, labor, and life that the gods have demanded must be given to them. It is how God breaks the root of every oppressive yoke, the power of death—the final enemy (1 Cor 15:26). The very instrument of torture that Rome needs to sustain imperial domination is now the tangible sign that the true God reigns, the source of rest (Sabbath) and release (Jubilee) for everything.

Conclusion

If the gospel is true, then its reality will be tangible in political, economic, and social life. The ethics of Christian socialism is grounded in the conviction that any faithful proclamation will manifest the reality of God’s eschatological Jubilee in exactly those ways. The Christian socialist does not equate the gospel with socialism but insists that the gospel cannot be faithfully proclaimed in capitalist society apart from participation in anti-capitalist politics and the emancipatory struggles to create social forms that transcend it. The Sabbath and Jubilee traditions, so central to Jesus’ mission, are the Christian heart of the Christian’s practice of socialist politics. They are a bulwark against idolatry, which shapes all of social life in capitalist society. The Christian socialist simply seeks to be faithful to Jesus’ ongoing mission to bring God’s eschatological Jubilee to all.

Hastening the end of capitalism is not the peculiar commitment of Christian socialists, but it is the most urgent ethical responsibility that Christians now have. All socialists, Christian or otherwise, are engaged in that work. The Christian’s moral responsibility, though, exceeds that of fending off the worst ecological and humanitarian consequences of our failure to act, and cannot be limited to prophetic fulminating in the abstract against the vices of capitalism. The practice of Christian socialism is about the credibility of our announcement of the gospel. It demands that we find concrete ways of disrupting the commodity’s mediation of social life and providing viable alternatives for society. Since capitalist society inflects every aspect of Christian life, Christian discipleship must involve the tangible reclamation of the time, work, and life that Capital devours, and the formation of new ways of “letting them go” in God’s rest. “Traditional” Christian practices may not be adequate for this task. We may, in fact, have to learn new ones and think of them in overtly revolutionary terms. If there is one thing to learn from modernity, it is that neither the mobilizing and advocacy work of progressive Christians nor chanting “return to the sources” is adequate to respond to capitalist society’s specific forms of domination. The practice of Christian socialism will mean learning to think and act much more like labor organizers—organizers of the social power of Jubilee that God has unleashed on creation in the resurrected Jesus. That is not just a matter of learning a new set of practices, but a transformation of what it means for the church to be the Body of Jesus Christ.

It is our most urgent task, but it is love’s work.

The time is fulfilled…believe in the good news

(Mark 1:15)

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