Sunday, October 01, 2006
The greatest Economic Thinker of them all
From the Reverend Tim Ling, Vicar at St. Swithun's Bathford
Dear Friends, It is hard to celebrate the harvest with pictures of malnourished refugees in Darfur on our TV screens each night. How can we celebrate our plenty when there are so many who have nothing? There are no easy answers to such a complicated question, as all the efforts of the United Nations and the World Food Organisation show. One source of help that is rarely if ever referred to at such levels is the Old Testament. Can you imagine the look on Jeremy Paxman’s face if a UN official were to launch a policy initiative based on the Book of Deuteronomy on Newsnight? But perhaps it’s not quite as crazy as it sounds.
The Old Testament tells the story of how God took one nation and revealed to them what it means to live together happily in God’s world. Now, they weren’t very good at it and, of course, the world is a very different place today to that of 1500BC. But could it be that God took this into account when he decided to do things this way? Could it be that in the pages of the Old Testament are principles capable of guiding even today’s technological societies in how to live together more equitably?
There are certainly some radical policy initiatives in these pages. For instance, the people are told that all outstanding debts are to be cancelled every 50 years, the year of Jubilee. Imagine the effect this would have on slowing the ever-widening gap between rich and poor; imagine the benefits of not saddling the next generation with the consequences of their parents’ mistakes.
Elsewhere, the people are told, ‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest … Leave them for the poor’. What effect would this have on the dominant economic wisdom of our day – the priority of the market, the relentless drive to maximize profits, the mantra that growth is good and the ruthless extinguishing of compassion from so much of public life?
Of course the issues raised here are complicated but might it not be worth listening a little more closely to the greatest Economic Thinker of them all?
With best wishes for a very happy Harvest time, Tim Ling Vicar, St. Swithun’s Church Bathford
P.S. We will be celebrating harvest in the Community Room on Monday, 9th October at 2:00pm. You are welcome to come along and enjoy singing your favourite harvest hymns.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.