Social Justice and the Jubilee (Good of Affluence #6)

As I mentioned in my fourth post, Schneider does, as a matter of fact, have some interesting and nuanced things to say about the Old Testament economic laws.  He, at any rate, is not content to use in the standard conservative dismissal that says these "laws" were not really laws but merely moral guidance--that would not, after all, help his case, since his interest is not in the duties of government toward the poor, but in the moral duties of Christian individuals.  Nor is he content to ascribe to laws like the Jubilee a purely spiritual and symbolic function, a mere prophecy of the spiritual jubilee of release from sin that Jesus brings (a strategy commonly employed by theonomists like Chilton and North who otherwise insist on taking the OT laws with strictest seriousness as New Covenant legal principles).  As I quoted before, he says at the outset of discussing this material that "concern for the poor and powerless (including the earth and animals)...is essential to the whole biblical vision of delight."  Later he affirms that "Sider is no doubt correct (as well as in line with all mainline Christian moral teaching) in thinking that the jubilee provisions are a model of some kind for the institution of social mechanisms in law and policy that protect people from losing everything they have."

So where's the rub?  Well, Schneider pushes us to evaluate more closely what the Jubilee actually does.  They do not universally redistribute wealth from the wealthiest to the poorest.  For instance, he points out, "The poorest people in society were unaffected by it.  For aliens, sojourners, non-Israelite debtors and slaves possessed no land in the first place and thus had no share in its repossession on the day of jubilee.  Their economic need, however dire, played no role in the redistribution."

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Those Socialist Hebrews

In the fascinating second chapter of his provocative book, The Hebrew Republic, Eric Nelson argues that the advocation of redistribution of wealth in the modern political tradition arose not from Enlightenment socialist ideas, but, believe it or not, from the seventeenth-century appeal to the authority of Old Testament Israel and the attempt to make it politically normative for modern societies.   This is an argument that is sure to turn the narrative of Bible-thumping Red State America on its head--according to that narrative, Scripture is adamant about the sanctity of private property, and in proportion as societies have sought to found their government upon Scripture, in the same proportion, they have protected private property rights.  Only when they have rebelled against God and embraced atheistic ideas, we are told, do they toy with evil utopian schemes like redistribution of wealth.  Right in line with this narrative, most modern Reformed advocates of some form of “theonomy”--the attempt to repristinate Biblical law in modern politics--have produced a “Biblical economics” that is curiously right-wing and libertarian.  

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Toward a Truly Free Market

John Medaille, a fellow with whom many of you may be familiar, and with whom I've had the pleasure of corresponding over the past months, recently published a very exciting new book which promises to answer all our questions (and perhaps provides that "Solution in a Nutshell" that I rashly promised)--Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits, and More.  

If like me you are eager to read it, but like me aren't sure when you'll have the time, you can find an excellent temporary substitute in Bp. Chuck Huckaby's thorough review at WorldviewChurch.org, which he was kind enough to send my way.  Medaille is a writer well-versed in the Roman Catholic ethical and political teaching, and in modern economics, which is extraordinary rarity and makes his work very important for all of us trying to find a truly theological but genuinely workable solution to the twin evils of capitalism and socialism.