Although people have spoken of greed as the source of our current problems, I suspect that it goes deeper. It is a little too easy to blame the present situation on an accumulation of individual greed, exemplified by bankers or brokers, and to lose sight of the fact that governments committed to deregulation and to the encouragement of speculation and high personal borrowing were elected repeatedly in Britain and the United States for a crucial couple of decades. Add to that the fact that warnings were not lacking of some of the risks of poor (or no) regulation, and we are left with the question of what it was that skewed the judgement of a whole society as well as of financial professionals. John Dunning, a professional analyst of the business world, wrote some six years ago about what he called the ‘crisis in the moral ecology’ of unregulated capitalism (in the editorial afterword to a collection of essays on Making Globalisation Good, p.357); and he and other contributors to his book discussed how ‘circles of failure’ could be created in the global economy by a combination of moral indifference, institutional crisis and market failure, each feeding on the others. Yet warnings went unheeded; people’s rational capacities, it seems, were blunted, and unregulated global capitalism was assumed to be the natural way of doing things, based on a set of rational market processes that would deliver results in everyone’s interest.
This was not just about greed. At least some apologists for the naturalness of the unregulated market pointed ”“ quite reasonably in the circumstances ”“ to the apparently infallible capacity of the market to free nations from poverty. It may help to turn for illumination to an unexpected source. Acquisitiveness is, in the Christian monastic tradition, associated with pride, the root of all human error and failure: pride, which is most clearly evident in the refusal to acknowledge my lack of control over my environment, my illusion that I can shape the world according to my will. And if that is correct, then the origin of economic dysfunction and injustice is pride ”“ a pride that is manifest in the reluctance to let go of systems and projects that promise more and more secure control, and so has a bad effect on our reasoning powers. This in turn suggests that economic justice arrives only when everyone recognises some kind of shared vulnerability and limitation in a world of limits and processes (psychological as well as material) that cannot be bypassed. We are delivered or converted not simply by resolving in a vacuum to be less greedy, but by understanding what it is to live as an organism which grows and changes and thus is involved in risk. We change because our minds or mindsets are changed and steered away from certain powerful but toxic myths.
The ABC writes: “We are delivered or converted not simply by resolving in a vacuum to be less greedy, but by understanding what it is to live as an organism which grows and changes and thus is involved in risk.”
I beg to differ. We are delivered and converted from the greed and desires of the flesh only by the power of God through the atonement and redemption afforded us by great cost God was willing to pay HIMSELF, by the sacrifice and the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ….which defeated the power of sin, hell and the devil. By His own blood, God gave us power over sin.
THIS is the Gospel that this ‘ABC’ and his cohorts ignore.
The ABC goes on at great length only to suggest at the end that we investigate ‘deeply’ the concept of freedom and whence it came.
The deliverance and conversion from the power and bondage of sin is the key to freedom which this ABC consistently fails to proclaim.
Instead of freedom and true conversion, Williams has, as Romans 1:32 warns, been in complicity with evil.
He does not defend the Faith of Christ whose fruit is Truth, Love and Life. Instead, he accedes to the ‘necessity’ of yeilding the UK, a civilized form of government to sharia law and doing so, he does not defend, but gives place to the encroachment of a religious political system whose real fruit are the opposite of the fruit of Christianity: lies, lust and death.
He does not speak out to defend womanhood while Lambeth is named the rape capital of the UK against the depersonalization and harm to women. The rape of women that is a characteristic of men in countries controlled by the islamic political religion. Instead, he wafts himself off to pay homage to the icon of womanhood, the Blessed Virgin Mary at Lourdes.
He does not defend the Church against the homosexual agenda. He ignores the evidence in Scripture, medicine and psychology. He does not seem to understand that homosexuality is in the mind and the feelings and behavior are symptoms of emotional pain borne of fatherlessness (having distant, abandoning, addicted or adulterous parent) and motherlessness (over-bearing or emotionally abusive or dependent mother). He does not admit this is another distortion of love, truth, life that he is sworn to defend. He does not see the disorientation, misdirection, mis-identification of personality and desires, the heightened desire/need for affirmation, for legitimate needs that were not supplied in the early years, created in dysfunctional family relations, by molestation, the trespass of God-given personal boundaries that sexualizes a child at an early age, that arrests emotional development and creates mis-beliefs about the self, others and the world.
Instead he has given place and stood in complicity with TEC, ACoC, et al and the homosexual agenda.
He does not see or agree with God about the evil of sin.
He must be either willfully blind and willfully complicit or unregenerate and/or deceived.
Whatever the problem in the heart of Rowan Williams, he has shown he is woefully unqualified to lead either a Christian parish or a world-wide communion, and should not be allowed to teach or publish theology. He is qualified to repent.
The Archbishop should turn his attention to preaching the Gospel, which is his business. His pronouncements on economic matters leave much to be desired.
Ah, what a bildungsphilister.
The interesting thing is realizing that he equates the desire to be productive with acquisitiveness, greed and perhaps indifference.
#4 – that’s not a correct interpretation. Catholic social teaching affirms productivity. The archbishop does connect desire with acquisitiveness, which is ancient social teaching.
#1 demonstrates what happens when a Christian enters a room when a Christian is talking to non-Christians. Different languages. What the Archbishop is doing is making the history of Christian thought relevant to those who don’t understand what ga/fl are saying. GA/FL is a good example of an evangelical who knows what to say to other evangelicals (after all, he’s not wrong about his theology; it just seems like he’s speaking martian), but has little idea about how to make it comprehensible to someone who doesn’t have the same alphabet.
It is a good and nuanced article that will be read by people who are ignorant of the Christian faith.
I don’t agree that the market is based on greed, which appears to be the assumption here. Rather I believe the market is founded on productivity; the human instincts to create, improve and produce. Consumption and greed are only the foundation of the market if you accept the worldview of Gordon Gekko as portrayed by Michael Douglas. Greed is far closer to sloth and envy than to work, creation and productivity. Common mistake but leads to many false conculsions.
#5 – no, you are wrong. Nuance does not the un-churched, alias lost. It is the proclamation of the Gospel. The lost want to know how to be saved. It was the question on the day of Pentecost, the question asked by the jailer, it is the deepest question of man’s heart.
Rowan does not proclaim clear truth; He reflects…he offers dim esoteric unfathomable complexities and subtle nuances…but not the saving message of Christ and Him crucified for the remission of sin.
#6, John, I fear that persons who read this long laborious article will remain ignorant of the Christian faith. I see little reference to how the Christian faith can help or could have helped save our world from the apparent calamity in which we now find ourselves. On the other hand, I find much in the Christian faith that could have been cited and used by the Archbishop, some of which was specified by #1 (though not all and not necessarily in the way #1 indicated). The main problem I see in our world today (in the US, UK and elsewhere) is so evident in this article … the ever present desire not to offend, not to claim rightness for the Christian faith. From the 70s the “I’m Ok; you’re OK” sydrome. Our own PB won’t claim the rightness; the Archbishop won’t, either. We won’t say, Christ had (has) it right … our problem worldwide is that we don’t put all of our trust in God (including our trust in economics, politics, and warfare), and we don’t love our neighbors as ourselves (wherever they might be), much less love our neighbors and other Christians as Christ loves us (which was His last commandment to us). If we actually used those two precepts as starting points, and worked from there, our world and how we deal with it would actually be much simpler, and I say would not require such an article (inspite of its alleged eroditeness) to be written for non-believers – they would know us by our love! Now John, you may say that what I just wrote is naive, simple-minded, ignorant, etc. Maybe it is. But I what do you think God thinks about the simplicity of it?
#8 – Billy. I don’t think Williams is concerned with theology in this talk at all….nor with what God thinks. It sounds like his aims are political not theological.
After re-reading this….one can see that Rowan Williams hints at a solution – a global network: “The five broad principles sketched above could only be fleshed out against a background in which people recognised that talking about the need for growth made no sense except in relation to a world of complex social and political relationships and of limited material resources – a background of willingness to ask not what might be abstractly possible in terms of increasing the range of consumer goods but what might be manageable as part of a balanced global network of forces, basic needs, mutual respect and so on.”
Perhaps a stage has been set for Rowan Williams to be a champion for global centralization. (That would be ironic since there is global mess in his hands right now in the rapidly de-centralization of the Anglican communion.)
First we have the effusively flattering Atlantic Monthly article touting Williams as a prophet of global proportions.
Coming up, William’s attendance of GC09 in Anaheim where TEC is bound to show off its global scope and Williams talk at a global economic forum.
Speaking for TEC, Rev. Canon Brian Grieves, the Episcopal Church’s senior director of mission and director of the Advocacy Center offers: “The global scene is so fragile, the world is so fractured, that we desperately need to engage partners across geographical lines and faith differences in order to create a climate of hope for just resolutions of conflicts that face us.”
Global goals – MDGs….global cooperation to global economy to…global religion melding islam and eastern religions with Christianity (China now has a state church as does Russia) to…global government and law melding US and British law with sharia and we arrive at the intended destination: global control – government, education, economy and religion.
Let’s abolish Christianity, US and UK patriotism, separate nations and teach the world to sing a globally approved totally inclusive, non-offensive, secular humanist pseudo-religious political song (for their own good). The masses don’t know what is good for themselves.
Only they forget Psalm 2…and Who is the Real World Power.
Rowan Williams needs to come up with a coherent thought on this. He seems to get close to one when he mentions government encouragement for indebtedness and speculation, but then retreats into typical soggy boilerplate. Does he not understand that it wasn’t some gaseous “deregulation” that caused this, but positive government policy? Why on earth would there be regulation of an economic activity the government is promoting? People were doing exactly what they were expected to.
And one not hunt down a moralist for warnings as to what was going on. Peter Wallison at the American Enterprise Institute warned about this as it was beginning, in 1999: “From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us. If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”
The lesson here that has to be learned isn’t that capitalism doesn’t work, it’s that state-run capitalism doesn’t work.
That second paragaph should have started, “And one no need hunt down…”
i’m not sure who read the article. It wasn’t easy and assumed people didn’t NEED to go back and get proof-texts.
It was a meditation on pride and the nature of making choices. It was thoroughly biblical and constituted the general thrust of Christian teaching. Our money is not, in fact, our own. Our ability to “choose” is not the same as freedom in Christ (conservatives use this with sexuality, but not with the market – which is what scripture was talking about more).