The Divine Commonwealth
by the Consp!re editors
Scripture said some wise things about how homo economicus should live: God made a rich creation, bountiful for all. We are to organize ourselves so that all share in that abundance. Don’t hoard but rather make sure everyone has enough. Work a bit, then rest—and let the land rest occasionally, as well. When things go awry—debt, bondage, inequities, folks cut off or too poor to get by—fix it. Create an economy which allows the goods of God’s bounty to flow freely, like grace itself.
Things did go awry, and God’s people forgot how to fix it. Despite centuries of prophetic insistence, despite the Human One’s miracles with loaves and fishes and nets strained to bursting; despite sermons on lilies of the field; despite the Pentecostal communalism of the earliest believers, we began to stray far from the divine commonwealth. We were given the magnificent gift of creation and an instruction manual for enjoying its blessings together—and squandered it for heaps of engraved metal and colored paper.
There’s a fourth-century quote attributed to St. John Chrysostom: “There are two ways to be rich: One is to have much, the other is to want little.” Some of us decided to have much. That choice came with dire consequences: impoverishment of our sisters and brothers, destruction of community, despoilment of the earth.
Amid the wreckage of modern economic theory and practice, many of God’s people are stirring to a new call of the Spirit. They are rethinking the script of “the good life”—careers and bank accounts and retirement funds. They are making the harrowing connections between shopping malls and the third-world shanties and oil poisoning the Gulf of Mexico. There is a whisper resonating around the globe: Another world is possible.
Here you will find creative and courageous responses to reshaping our economic life—creative experiments; glimmers of hope-filled practice and possibility. We don’t all have the same answers, but we are all trying to heed Jesus’ stark challenge to serve God, not Mammon. We might be social-venture entrepreneurs, taming the tools of capitalism to create green jobs for former welfare recipients. We might be radical anarchists defecting from civilization and its discontent, going unplugged and feral on a piece of land. We might be trying to care for the multitudes of widows, orphans, and sojourners abandoned by the Temple. We might simply be trying to figure out what is the faithful thing to do with the hunk of change Grandpa left us. But in some way, we are all trying to be the hundred-fold mothers, brothers, and sisters to each other that Jesus promised in the New Economy (Mark 10:29-30).
This is Jesus’ way to abundant life, a life not based on exploitation, hoarding, and inequities. It’s a promise we can live by.
