Capitalism and the Bible 04 - The Jubilee

[Barney]

At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. This is how it is to be done: every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made to a fellow Israelite. They shall not require payment from anyone among their own people, because the Lord’s time for cancelling debts has been proclaimed. You may require payment from a foreigner, but you must cancel any debt your fellow Israelite owes you. However, there need be no poor people among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the Lord your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today. For the Lord your God will bless you as he has promised, and you will lend to many nations but will borrow from none. You will rule over many nations but none will rule over you.

If anyone is poor among your fellow Israelites in any of the towns of the land that the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted towards them. Rather, be open-handed and freely lend them whatever they need. Be careful not to harbor this wicked thought: ‘The seventh year, the year for cancelling debts, is near,’ so that you do not show ill will towards the needy among your fellow Israelites and give them nothing. They may then appeal to the Lord against you, and you will be found guilty of sin. Give generously to them and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to. There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be open-handed towards your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.

According to Christianity, these laws are given by God to his people to set an example of true justice in the world. Yet it seems to me that from a capitalist point of view there's a lot of coercion by gunpoint here. By definition, really - they are laws. Worse still, the rich are being coerced into cancelling debts incurred by the poor. Where is the justice in that? The debt was freely consented to by both parties. The rich earned the money fairly, and the poor spent it, probably unwisely. How can it be fair to simply cancel it? How can it be God's own definition of justice?

[Ondrej]

Yes, there is certainly a lot of coercion going on.

Let's consider the purchase of a house. In the US, houses are typically financed for 30 years. In the arrangement laid out in Deuteronomy the maximum amount of time one could possibly finance a house for would be 7 years. If we assume the lending company is not ripping anyone off and just charges the interest for a normal profit, you can only buy 23% of what you could compared to the 30 year financing IF it's at the beginning of the 7 years. At the end of the 7 years it's down to just 3%. In my estimation this arrangement would mainly hurt the borrowers who would likely benefit tremendously from longer financing. What do you think?

I think this arrangement was mainly intended to foreshadow the forgiveness of Christ rather than to speak of the ideal way to arrange debt law.

God also appoints dictators to rule over His people. I don't think this was a statement that dictatorship is the ideal way to structure government.

[Barney]

You make several points here.

• Your first point is about whether this rule can be directly applied to the 21st century, and I agree that it cannot. There were particular reasons for the jubilee that are no longer valid today because our economy works so differently. As with all Old Testament law, its purpose is to teach us about God's character and his will for how we should treat one another. We must then creatively apply it to our own situation.
• Your second point is your own attempt to apply it to our own situation. You propose a purely spiritual application, without any relevance for contemporary politics and economics. In other words, this passage has zero to teach us about God's will for the economy. Do you think God has any will for the economy, beyond "thou shalt not steal"? Or is God equally happy with all outcomes as long as that basic rule is kept?
• Your third point seems to confuse what God allows with what God wants. Sure, in a sense, everything that ever happened was ordained by God, in that God could have prevented it and yet chose not to. But in another sense, the very meaning of the words "wrong," "evil," "sinful," is destroyed if we say that nothing ever happens that is contrary to God's will. So yes, God "appoints" rulers who do not rule in a way he would want, because he has his own longer-term purposes that involve a slow, non-coercive battle against evil. But on the other hand, how do we find out God's purposes for how we should live, if we can't even turn to the Bible itself for answers?

In fact your third point leads to a very liberal hermeneutic, according to which we should take nothing the Bible says at face value at all. It is more commonly used by those who wish to support women in positions of church leadership (because Paul's prescriptions about marriage only applied to his own culture, not to our own), gay marriage (because Paul never imagined the idea of a stable monogamous same-sex union), etc. etc. I'm a little surprised to see you, a conservative, using this hermeneutic to explain away things written very clearly in the Bible. How far are you willing to take it?