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17 Mar 09
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At first glance, Christian doctrine and economic exigencies seem unrelated, but in recent days I have come across two different ways of bringing them together.
One is an updated version of the Protestant linking of thrift and virtue. Given that we are commanded by the Bible to be good stewards of God’s graces (I Peter 4:10), the prudent management of the material goods of His creation is a religious duty; not because we are to attach ourselves to those goods (that would be idolatry), but because we will only be able to turn our minds to the true treasure — God’s love for us — if we are free from the crippling anxieties that overwhelm us when our earthly treasure is threatened.
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But in another popular Christian discourse, there is no way out of debt, and bankruptcy is the condition we are in from the moment of birth. This is a Calvinist discourse in which the language of money is allegorized. The debt we owe is owed to the God who made us in his image, an image defiled and corrupted by Adam and Eve, whose heirs in sin we all are. We may think that this unhappy inheritance could be overlain and covered by a succession of good deeds, but every deed we perform is infected by the base motives from which we cannot move one inch away. Every piece of currency we offer in payment of debt only increases it. The situation seems hopeless.
But it’s not, we are told, if we embrace bankruptcy rather than try (vainly) to extricate ourselves from it. The acknowledgment of bankruptcy and of the impossibility of working our way free of it is the beginning of wisdom.
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14 Mar 09
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09 Mar 09
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