The December issue of The Atlantic Magazine’s lead article has an intriguing question: Did Christianity Cause the Crash? (December, 2009 38-48). It’s worth the read.
One wants to offer the response: “I hope so!” because in this time of Advent with Mary’s Song lying at the center of Luke’s birth narratives one cannot miss the economic implications of the Gospel.
But this is not what Hanna Rosin’s article is suggesting. In fact, the opposite is the case. She argues that North American Christianity’s penchant to interpret Jesus in terms of a health and wealth gospel has been a major factor in the greedy, consuming, God-wants-us-to-get-as-much-as-we-can, adolescent, Peter-Pan-like religion that has permeated North America since at least the end of World War II and that this religion of greed and self-centeredness is a major part of the economic meltdown.
This is an important article and well worth the read. But there is nothing really new in its argument. It is, however, a testimony to the historical and theological myopia of much North American Christianity. Hanna Rosin suggests that Christianity once promised the faithful their reward in the afterlife. This is a standard myth and misunderstood, but, certainly one still believed by many Christians in North America. The argument, therefore, is that over the past century this promise has been changed from some eschatological future into the here and now. With the right approach, the proper praying, believing and imagining God’s promises can become present reality in terms of health and wealth. Thus, Christians invest in housing and other investments and so contribute to the economic bubble that goes bust.
Our myopia is in believing this narrative. It is profoundly anti-gospel in every way. To believe either side of this argument - the eschatological future of the Gospel’s promises and the present achievement of health and wealth - is to be blind and ignorant of the Biblical narrative. It is more about captivity to the cannons of modern progress and the psychobabble of contemporary individualistic life than the Gospel.
Earlier in the last century people like Reinhold Niebuhr and William Stringfellow wrote eloquently about these captivities and offered other ways of being Gospel people in this culture. In our own day people like Michael Budde and Walter Brueggemman expose for us the captivities that have caused us to embrace a destructive culture of greed and consumerism that leaves most of us terribly alone and profoundly anxious about our lives.
Earlier this year Colin Greene and I exchanged a series of notes about the economic meltdown. They don’t offer definitive answers but we recommend them to you again in the light of Rosin’s article.
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