the gospel and economic liberation

Posted by Paul | Filed under work

I’ve been reading Miroslav Volf’s Work in the Spirit. Hard work to read (at least on the train), but interesting. One side point that stood out was this…

Economic alienation … often directly or indirectly causes alienation from God. We read in Exodus, for instance, that the oppressed and exploited Israelite slaves “did not listen to Moses on account of their … cruel bondage” (Exod 6:9). Economic alienation hindered their believing God and grasping the promise of liberation.

I found this fascinating and it brings out something that I’d never heard anywhere else. (Oh, I’m sure someone has covered it, probably in one of the books on my shelf, but I wasn’t paying attention…)

In the frequent discussions of the relationship between the gospel and social justice, I’ve seen few, if any, consider the possibility that social justice might, in some cases, be an important first step for people to hear the good news. We discuss whether social justice might be a significant consequence of the gospel or whether it provides some demonstration of God’s liberation, but we don’t consider that it might need to come first in some situations, that people might need to be helped at a more basic level before they can hear what we have to say.

But if we truly believe that life is not divided into the material/secular and the spiritual, is it so unreasonable that alienation in economics, work or daily life can make it hard for us to grasp the deeper ‘promise of liberation’?

And if we take serious what we see in the story of the Moses, then how should this affect our actions? Perhaps it should make us re-consider our attitude to third-world debt or fair trading or oppressive work environments…

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Permalink | October 1st, 2009

2 Responses to “the gospel and economic liberation”

  1. Mark Says:
    Mark October 7th, 2009 at 12:46 pm

    i tried reading Miroslav Volf once, but it was too hard so i gave up…!

  2. Paul Says:
    Paul October 7th, 2009 at 6:57 pm

    I've got three of his books now and I've almost made it through one of them!

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