Economic Justice as a Matter of Confession

November-December 1997

By Bob Goudzwaard

DEBRECEN, Hungary—On August 9-20, the General Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) met here in Hungary WARC is a 120-year-old ecumenical organization that unites more than 70 million Christians in the Reformed tradition throughout the world. Most of these Christians are from the "South," especially Africa and Asia. The council meeting, which brought together more than 1000 people, had as its theme, "Breaking the Chains of Injustice." The results of the conference demonstrate that a major effort is under way in ecumenical circles to redirect reflection on political and economic life in a confessional way. In other words, the direction that Christian social responsibility should take is being sought from within the confession of Christian faith itself.

Since 1948, the ecumenical movement has placed a strong emphasis on a critique of the existing structures of society. Those structures have been seen as the root cause of prevailing social and economic injustice. Almost all features of market- oriented economies, for example, were condemned as unjust.

In the addresses and reports at Debrecen, however, there was evidence of a subtle and important shift. Social institutions like markets are no longer seen as bad in themselves. To the contrary, some of the speakers even quoted John Calvin to the effect that markets are meant by God to be an expression of mutual human service and, as such, are a gift of God's grace. This does not mean that present market economies bear no responsibility for the increasing impoverishment of parts of Africa and Asia, or for the ongoing destruction of the environment. There is always a leading spirit behind social and economic developments, and the current global expansion of market economies bears testimony to a spirit quite different from the spirit of God's kingdom in Christ.

One of the Debrecen reports speaks of hard and ruthless competition related to greed and of increasing exclusion of the poorest parts of the world from the global economy. Forests are being destroyed as if they had no other value than their immediate economic use, and many plant and animal species are being eliminated as well. The report even speaks of an emerging "casino economy" built on the movement of speculative capital rather than on real investments necessary to satisfy basic human needs. One third of the world's population still has to live on an income equal to or lower than one dollar a day.

Against the backdrop of these reports, WARC took seriously the call from the churches of the South and will begin a new confessional process to face these issues. All member churches of WARC are called to recognize that economic injustice and environmental destruction have their roots in the kingdom of mammon rather than in the kingdom of the living God. The General Council directed the churches to help their members see that the time has come for a joint public confession whereby Christians commit themselves to resist the claims of a largely materialistic culture that permeates and distorts social and economic life.

This is more easily said than done, of course. After Debrecen, the main question is whether the churches of the North and South will be willing to follow this path. For in choosing to agree that resistance to environmental destruction and material greed is essential to Christian confession, Christians must recognize that the capacity of the world is too limited to fulfill both the basic needs of the poor and the luxury demands of wealthy, mostly northern societies. The latter will need to give priority to the more basic needs of others.

The final Declaration from Debrecen therefore states correctly that "because we are not our own," we have to commit ourselves to simple life styles for the sake of others. If we confess the Christian faith without agreeing to the economic consequences of that confession, we speak hypocritically; our confession becomes a lie. The call to accept the consequences of the Christian faith is built into the confession.

The new confessional process affirmed at Debrecen has now begun, and one hopes that the upcoming 1998 Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Nairobi will adopt the same approach. Yet the process may be a longer and more painful one than most delegates to the WARC meeting were expecting.

[Dr. Goudzwaard is a professor of economics at the Free University of Amsterdam and will be one of the speakers at the conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of Abraham Kuyper's Stone Lectures at Princeton Seminary, to be held at Princeton February 25-28, 1998.]