Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Death, Taxes, And The Bible

As a people, we are living a good bit longer than folks did even a couple of generations ago, but we all know that every last one of us is going to die, no matter what. And we have also believed that, just as the grim reaper will find us eventually, so will the tax man. Or will he? The tax man, that is, not the grim reaper.

If tinkering with the tax code --- to date pretty much a bipartisan business --- keeps moving in the direction its current tinkerers apparently think it should --- then some people in our country may wind up saying good-by to this world without ever saying hello to tax men and women at all. Not very many, of course. Payroll taxes either will remain the same or increase. Rebates on and cuts in income taxes will benefit the very large majority of taxpayers very little. And so, most of us will still be able to chant the "death and taxes" refrain for about as long as we pray "Even so, Lord, quickly come."

But by design, there are a privileged few who are going to be relieved of this burden for a long time to come. They are the ones whose incomes are large enough to keep their Social Security and Medicare taxes annoying, but relatively inconsequential in their larger schemes of things. They are the ones who will pass on the benefits of their successes unencumbered by estate taxes. And if their bought and paid for tinkerers can keep on disguising their real agenda, they will be the ones who will pay no taxes on their capital investments at all. Three guesses as to how they will be making their money then. The first two don't count.

Many of the people tinkering their way to this kind of Promised Land are good Christian people who seem to have gained assurance of the rightness of their cause by some version of the very "trickle-down" economic theories that experts in the field have been questioning for decades. If the richer are permitted to do what they need to do in order to get richer, the thinking goes, the poorer will get richer too. A pouring down rain raises all boats. At least, if it doesn't sink some of them first.

For my pre-November election studying this year, I've been taking some fresh looks at, of all things, the Bible. This can be a tricky business at best, and downright dangerous at worst, when the subject at hand is economics. For instance, one thing you find in the Bible is a rather consistent denunciation of the practice of putting bread on the table and a boat down at the marina by using money to earn interest. And the people who pay the interest are just as guilty as those who charge it. If you are of a Fundamentalist leaning, and want to argue that everything the Bible says is binding on us today in the same ways as it was when the Bible first said it, let me know how you are doing with refinancing your life-style in the light of this teaching. Better yet, why not just get it over with and share everything you've got with all the rest of us, right now?

Looking to the Bible for guidance on the decisions we make about money does not have to be as tricky or as dangerous as we might otherwise think it is. For instance, one Old Testament text from The Book of Amos defined a starting point more than adequately both for ancient Judaism and early Christianity:


"Listen to this, you that grind the poor and suppress the humble in the land while you say…"When will the sabbath be past so that we may expose our wheat for sale, giving short measure in the bushel and taking overweight in the silver, tilting the scales fraudulently, and selling the refuse of the wheat; that we may buy the weak for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals?" (Amos 8:4-6, REB)

Jesus' economic theory lines up with the prophet's quite well. It assumed that we must begin all our decision-making with a concern for the poor. By contrast, working hard on not being poor, and doing so at the expense of the poor, is a sure way to get locked out at the gates of heaven. But at least the surroundings will not be strange to us. For it is precisely on the outside and not the inside of those gates that most of our tax tinkering has been going on.

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Who's In, Who's Out, and Who Says

Plunging into the Scriptures is spiritually renewing for me, especially when I can look at them with the help of scholars who are both serious and faithful about their craft. Wrangling with the "Church Fathers" is my close second to wrestling with the Bible. One morning, while poking around in a number of Patristic texts and commentaries, willy-nilly, I re-discovered an important fact about the theological discussions of the first three centuries that is more than just a little relevant to this present decade.

In those days, every revered teacher held very strong opinions about what everyone else ought to think about the emerging core doctrines of the church. The trouble was that the opinions they put forward differed greatly, even though this obvious fact did not stop them from insisting that if you did not agree with them about their favorite doctrinal constructions, you had already put yourself outside the Christian fellowship.

Ever since Constantine dictated that potentially divisive theological debates should be snuffed out either by his bishops' votes or his armies' swords, the church has been working overtime to convince Christians that they must all share one mind about every core belief of our common faith. As Constantine behaved toward the bishops, all too many church leaders behave toward their fellow believers: affirm the same things in the same way, or you're out. In previous centuries, you were not only out; you could also be dead.

Religious freedom? The dictates of conscience? The devil, you say. We'll tell you what and how to believe, and whether you are doing the belief-thing right or not. The erudite way of putting this is usually to make frequent references to "the mind of the Church" as having long ago demonstrated beyond all doubt the errors of deviant opinions about God, Christ, and human destiny. Make that mind your own, and you will be thinking straight as a Christian. Step outside that framework of thought for even a moment, and you will lose not only your own mind and your friends in the true faith, but your eternal soul as well.

For a while, it looked like the Protestantist movements of the sixteenth century were going to help greatly in recovering the openness of a truly apostolic Christianity. But not even a generation after Luther nailed his own theses to the Wittenburg church door, Protestant groups of all ilks were promulgating creeds and confessions to show (a) how wrong all the Catholics are, and (b) how even more wrong all the other Protestants are. The first objective is not the issue it once was, but the second still is. Holding fast to the right beliefs, as defined by the right people, once again threatens to become the single most important sign of genuine faith.

The idea that there is one and only one "mind of the Church" is fetching, but also wistful. One thing that psychology has taught us well is that we argue the most vehemently for things about which we have the greatest doubts. We need to apply this teaching to the fact that churches sometimes get their people to say the same things in the same way only by force. Christians do not and cannot see things alike all the time, contrary to the illusions of those in our time who are calling the rest of us to wage a jihad for "purity of doctrine."

Actually, the idea of "the mind of the Church" is a very dangerous idea. What makes it so is that it generally confuses the whole Church of Jesus Christ with the leaders of and in it who have their own favorite theological axes to grind. Much of what has passed for authoritative church teaching is just that: the prescriptions and prohibitions of a chosen few who are authorized to define the faith for rather than with everybody else, and to ostracize those who think differently than they do.

Are there beliefs that in the holding of them will set us outside the Christian fellowship? Of course. One is that the Maker of Heaven and Earth takes delight in the destruction of anything he has created. Another is that anything we do is acceptable in the sight of God as long as we do it from sincere and thoughtful deliberation. And there are more besides. But in the end of the day, the "mind of the Church" will contain far fewer of them than a lot of church leaders will like, and some of their most righteously held favorites not at all.