Rebooting

Madness is doing something over, thinking it will yield different results next time:

If all you do is what you always done, all you’re ever going to have is what you always had. (Def Leppard)

Saturday’s Board of Social Responsibility reflected on the need to reboot, using excellent materials from the CTBI Conference in January. At the centre of these was a paper by Bob Goudzwaard, Dutch economics professor, on money and idolatry.

Even in narrow financial terms, some wondered why we are now loading money so freely into the top of a discredited system, rather than financing businesses on the streets, refloating the economy, as it were, from the bottom up. Perhaps it’s time to re-read our own Scriptures in the light of experience, including such concepts as Jubilee, Shalom, and household. This might even mean challenging usury — the making of money out of money alone, with no added work. This cornerstone of recent practice is consistently condemned in the Hebrew Scriptures as unjust, immoral and oppressive in itself.

We need to reboot. But how?With the question ringing in our ears, and the Scriptures at our right hand, it’s interesting to begin by remembering that everything impacts everything else in interesting ways: