Reflections on God and Money: Sooner or Later (7)

You shall not charge interest on loans to your brother, interest on money, interest on food, interest on anything that is lent for interest. You may charge a foreigner interest, but you may not charge your brother interest, that the Lord your God may bless you in all that you undertake in the land that you are entering to take possession of it.

Deuteronomy 23:19-20

My second reason for thinking that a still greater financial catastrophe lies ahead of us is that our economic system is built on usury and capitalism, practices that abuse the poor.

By capitalism, I do not mean the private ownership and distribution of goods and services. I do not mean free trade. I mean a type of free trade that gives pre-eminence to money and the need to maximise profit. We have looked at this in past Reflections and in the short book, Sustainability and Transcendence in Business.

We have also previously reflected on usury. Usury is widely misunderstood today in the West, where is it generally believed to be excessive interest charged on a loan. In fact, it is any interest or return that takes no account of the actual profit and loss of the investment.

Usury was widely banned across the ancient world because it is the systematic transfer of wealth from poor to rich and an easy means of oppressing the poor by financial slavery (called, ‘peony’). The Old Testament prophet Ezekiel condemned the men of Jerusalem for a number of ‘abominations’ that include usury; as we read in the above passage, it was as evil as sacrilege and sexual immorality. In Psalm 15, one of the criteria for living in God’s sanctuary is to lend money without usury.

While people have always used credit for specific purposes, consumer credit is a modern concept that has allowed usury to dominate national economies and impose it on people in developing countries.

Some Christians think that Jesus approved of usury in his parables of the talents and the minas (or, pounds) recorded in Matthew 25 & Luke 19. I disagree. Clearly, the parables are not about usury but the use of the personal abilities and the Gospel message but, nonetheless, Jesus’ parables illustrate how he thought life should be lived and it was evident when a character behaved badly. Accordingly, the conversations between the characters in the parables show that ‘a hard man’ benefits from usury and such investment is, at best, inferior to productive trade.

All nations struggle to limit the potential for evil inherent in capitalism and usury. They threaten economic well-being today because God has a particular concern for the poor and does not allow injustice to continue indefinitely.

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Friday, 22 November 2013

Sooner or Later (7)