Churches and Cooperatives (Part IV): Economic Justice in the Bible
John Aden
Economic Justice in the Bible
Approaching the Bible with class in mind reframes our understanding of the text and prompts the Church to evaluate its practices through the biblical principles of economic justice. Class analysis poses the questions: Who holds the power, and how does power function? Who benefits from the operative economic system? What is the purpose of the economy, and what values does it carry? Where is God active, and whose side does God take? These questions alter our reading of the Bible and our reading of the world around us. With these questions in mind, my analysis here will highlight a through line of economic justice concerns in the exodus narrative, the prophetic witness, and the ministry of Jesus. In contrast to capitalist faith in individualism, competition, profit maximization and top-down control, the biblical vision of economics is rooted in restraint, cooperation, shared responsibility, and God’s solidarity with the poor.
The people of Israel were primarily poor subsistence farmers. Due to their marginalized position, their theological and economic worldview frequently challenged the extractivist economics of the empire. In opposition to Egyptian slavery, the exodus narrative reveals an economic counter-theology founded in God’s care for the oppressed. Reading from the Israelites’ agrarian perspective, Ellen Davis describes the Egyptian economy in familiar extractivist terms: “the wealth of the land flowed upward, away from the small farmers, serfs, and slaves who composed the overwhelming majority of the population” and into the hands of the elites.1
Against the harsh realities of slavery, the Israelites’ wilderness experience revealed a new model of economics, what Davis calls the “counternarrative of manna.”2 Manna is freely given as an expression of care for God’s people. The Israelites have a responsibility to evenly distribute it among all of the people (Ex. 16:16-18), and when some Israelites try to hoard more than their daily share, it rots and melts away (Ex. 16:19-21). In short, the manna economy is about the practice of restraint, the concrete embodiment of trust in God and care for neighbors.3
The first rule of capitalist economics is the law of scarcity: there is never enough to satisfy our wants. Restraint and equitable sharing are inherently irrational by the empire’s logic. But trusting in the “enoughness” of God’s care reorients our understanding of food and other life-giving economic resources from “products” we create out of scarcity to “gifts” we receive out of abundance.4In the exodus experience, hope is not based in self-centered profit maximization or individualistic spiritual salvation, rather salvation is articulated in terms of communal liberation. The economic dimension of this liberation is grounded by faith in a God who shows up among the marginalized, not the powerful. In practice, restraint is not about moralizing individual consumers to be less greedy. We embody economic restraint in community when we follow God’s lead and work for the transformation of systems that prevent all people from sharing in the earth’s abundance.
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The Hebrew prophets expressed God’s solidarity with the poor by crying out against elites who enriched themselves by extracting resources from the poor. Ancient economies were characterized by sharp urban-rural divides—the wealthy few typically residing in cities. The centralization of power within cities required rural farmers to specialize their trades so they could meet the ever-growing urban demand for both necessities and luxuries. The rural poor were subjected to excessive taxation, unjust credit relations, and third-party ownership of the land they worked. It is no surprise that the development of rural prophecy paralleled this shift from local subsistence to intercommunal extraction.5 Isaiah criticized the elites who “add house to house” and “field to field” (Isa. 5:8), squeezing out the poor who have little economic or political recourse. But a reversal is coming:
Therefore Sheol has enlarged its appetite
and opened its mouth beyond measure;
the nobility of Jerusalem and her multitude go down,
her throng and all who exult in her.
People are bowed down, everyone is brought low,
and the eyes of the haughty are humbled.
But the Lord of hosts is exalted by justice,
and the Holy God shows himself holy by righteousness. (Isa. 5:14-16)
This critique of the elites is simultaneously a cry for justice and a rebuke of Israel’s faith in the idols of economic extraction. The elites exchanged the righteousness of the Holy God (defined in terms of communal justice and right relations rather than individual piety) for the allure of top-down power. They have broken their covenantal relation with the God “who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing” (Deut. 10:18), taking advantage of those whom they were called to join in solidarity.
Amos likewise condemns the rich who extract wealth from poor farmers who are forced to sell their labor for meager survival. The Lord will not forget the deeds of those who “bring ruin to the poor of the land… buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals” (Amos 8:4-7). Amos concludes on a note of hope, promising that the poor will one day reap the rewards of their own labor (Amos 9:14). Ultimately, this vision is an affirmation of non-extractive labor relations and economic self-determination among the poor, a return to right relations with God and the land.6 Unlike the lazy elites who profit from the labor of others, those closest to the land recognize that it is a gift from God meant to be engaged cooperatively for the flourishing of the whole community.
Jesus carried on this prophetic tradition by embodying God’s solidarity with the oppressed and announcing the coming reign of God, a holistic reversal of the dominant powers of the world.7 Contrary to individualistic distortions of the Christian faith, Jesus’s understanding of God’s reign was characterized by a “strong-group orientation” and deeply influenced by “an appreciation of non-elite experience in his social world.”8 Born in a feeding trough and raised as a carpenter, his position among poor working people allowed him to articulate a vision of economics based not in endless growth but in relations of mutuality and reciprocity. This vision was a direct challenge to Caesar’s extractive regime.
Rieger argues that the tension between Jesus and Caesar is the choice between two wholly different ways of life: “According to one logic, the power of God resembles the power of the empire, ‘power over,’ operating from the top down, affected by no one; according to the other logic, the power of God takes a shape that moves in a different direction, embodying and actively seeking relationship with struggling humanity and all of creation.”9 Jesus’s way of life is a complete revaluation of our economic, political, and spiritual modes of being. God does not reign from the palace or the boardroom; God reigns among the people through the establishment of right relations.
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As Duchrow and Hinkelammert argue, Jesus’s annunciation and embodiment of God’s reign “shows that the exploitative, violent, and imperial civilization of his time and of all times cannot be overcome by simply using the same methods and gaining victory. Rather the structures and essence of power have to be changed. Power has to be relational, a mutual service.”10 Jesus does not reject power as such; he rejects the particularly malignant form of elite power over the poor and marginalized. Jesus intentionally situates himself among the people and rejects the temptation of top-down power.11 In doing so, he reimagines power in relations of bottom-up, cooperative solidarity. Unsurprisingly, the wealthy—then and now—have struggled to accept Jesus’s message, and their unwillingness to divest from extractive power and redistribute their inordinate wealth constitutes their own rejection of the reign of God (Mark 10:17-27).
Jesus used parables to help his audience envision the reign of God. Parables are complex, layered metaphors that communicate spiritual truths, yet Jesus presents no simple binary between the spiritual and the material, so the economic dimensions of the parables should not be taken for granted. The parable of the vineyard owner (Matt. 20:1-16) is perhaps the most challenging of his economic parables. Five separate groups of day laborers are called to work in a vineyard at various times of the day. At the end of the day, they all receive the same wage despite working different hours. From a capitalist perspective, this makes absolutely no sense. The vineyard owner could have (or even should have, according to those who worked all day) paid workers according to the standard of “fairness” that equates laborers’ value with the hours they work. But Jesus rejects the paradigm that says humans are only as valuable as the labor they sell.
A careful reading of the text shows that the later workers were always willing to work, but they had no other opportunities. What counts is not their productivity but their need and their willingness to work.12 The laborers who worked part of the day are no less responsible for their families’ well-being than those who worked all day. By pushing beyond what the dominant economic hierarchies say workers deserve, Jesus expands the scope of economic responsibility. As Miguel De La Torre claims, “Reading the Bible from the margins, the lesson is that those who are economically privileged, like the [vineyard] owner, must remain responsible for those who are not.”13 Jesus envisions an economic order ruled not by the demands of efficiency and profit maximization but by meeting the needs of all.
The early Christian communities evidently took this message to heart, sharing possessions in common and distributing according to need (Acts 2:44-45; 4:32-35). While there are rich traditions of monastic orders emulating this model throughout Christian history, few churches—and even fewer capitalists—operate by this logic today. Taking this parable a step further, then, effectively orienting an economy around workers’ needs entails bridging the gap between owners and workers. Working towards the reign of God and embodying the biblical standards of economic justice goes beyond tinkering with the theoretical values of the economy. Instituting these values means reshaping the economy from the bottom up.
In sum, the Bible presents a tradition of economic justice fundamentally at odds with the values of neoliberal capitalism. The biblical vision of restraint, cooperation, shared responsibility, and solidarity with the poor is anathema to the ideal of individualistic profit maximization. It is worth asking, however, if this theological interpretation of economic justice is not overly utopian in a world marred by sin.
A tree, after all, is judged not by its ideals but by its fruit. First, the climate crisis and widespread global poverty are evidence enough that the extractivist model produces unbearably rotten fruit. An alternative must be sought. Second, there is tremendous theological and political value in a utopian vision. The clear articulation of a better alternative engages our eschatological imagination, prompting us to denounce the sinful present order while simultaneously announcing a better alternative.14 Our steps towards an alternative may necessarily be partial, but the reign of God always exists in a tensive space: here but not yet. Working for an alternative is an act of faith in the God who casts the powerful down from their thrones, lifts up the lowly, and brings good news to the poor (Luke 1:52, 4:18). As Gustavo Gutiérrez says, faith affirms that our acts of liberation are never in vain: they have “value in terms of communion with God—in terms of salvation.”15 The simple fact of capitalism’s present dominance does not make it more tenable than a “utopian” vision of economic justice—but choosing between capitalism and an untested alternative is a false binary.
Churches do not have to build a new economy from scratch. There are current and historical models of economic organization that already offer steps towards the theological ideals of cooperation and solidarity. Alternatives rarely seem viable until we see them, and with the Church’s support, cooperative economic models can present an imaginative yet pragmatic alternative to capitalist hegemony.
1 Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 68.
2 Davis, 69.
3 Davis, 75.
4 Davis, 75.
5 Davis, 122.
6 Ulrich Duchrow and Franz J. Hinkelammert, Transcending Greedy Money: Interreligious Solidarity for Just Relations (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 48.
7 Liberation theologians have long recognized Jesus’s solidarity with the oppressed and God’s “preferential option for the poor.” See especially James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia, PA: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1970), 197-227; Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, revised edition, trans. and ed. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973).
8 K.C. Hanson and Douglas E. Oakman, Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts, Second Edition (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008), 117.
9 Rieger, Jesus vs. Caesar, 17.
10 Duchrow and Hinkelammert, 57.
11 See the temptation of Christ (Luke 4:1-13; Matthew 4:1-11). Jesus rejects the devil’s offer of imperial power (a form of power over the people rather than power among the people) because it would be a rejection of God’s authority. See also Jesus’s avoidance of kingship in John 6:15.
12 Miguel A. De La Torre, The Politics of Jesús: A Hispanic Political Theology (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 104; See also Cara Beed and Clive Beed, “God, Word and Wealth,” Evangelical Review of Society and Politics 4:2 (2010): 59.
13 De La Torre, 107.
14 Gutiérrez, 136.
15 Gutiérrez, 139.