The founding liberals misread the Bible. Our postliberalism, for its part, attempts a rereading free from the categories of liberalism—and a subsequent construction of a Christian society on the basis of the well-read Scriptures. Consistent with their forefathers, liberals are currently misreading the biblical injunctive for a Great Reset and attempting to resurrect a pagan system of debt-forgiveness that the Bible killed and buried several thousand years ago. It is necessary to correct them and envision the biblical alternative.
Israel was organized by a three-tiered system of kinship comprised of the tribe, the clan, and the household. Gideon’s modest reply to his angelic visitor shows us all three: “Look at my clan—it is the weakest in the tribe of Manasseh; and I am the least in my father’s house” (Judg 6:15). The family and the clan had greater social and economic importance than the tribe in terms of benefits and responsibilities relating to individual Israelites. We can call this the Old Testament take on subsidiarity: The father’s house was a place of authority, even for married adults like Gideon (Judg 6:27; 8:20). It was also the place of security and protection (Judg 6:30–32). The clan was a larger grouping of a number of fathers’ houses and an important subsection of the tribe. The clans were named after the grandsons of Jacob or other members of the patriarchal family tree (cf Numbers 26 and 1 Chronicles 4–8), thereby acknowledging that they were units of recognizable kinship.(1)
God divided Israel according to clans, in Joshua 13–21. This is a remedial feature of the age of the Law, (as the scholastics called it) resembling the idea of “the universal destination of all earthly goods”—the fact that God gifted creation to all of us and not just to some; that we are all to enjoy and cultivate God’s creation; that we all have an “inheritance” of the land, not just a select few.
But this Israel, constructed as a living image of just distribution, was still afflicted by the effects of the Fall: falling on tough economic times, whether through sin, foolishness, or disaster, inevitably led Israelites to sell their possessions for quick cash. This meant rearranging God’s equitable division of land—some accumulated more and others ended up with less than the divine distribution dictated.
God had a plan for this. Our modern, state-planned capitalist system does not. Here, if someone falls on hard economic times, he must sell whatever he has to whomever he can. More often than not, he does not get a good deal. Desperate for cash, he is willing to take whatever he can get—and is usually forced to sell to someone considerably more affluent, powerful, and skillful in negotiations than himself. The Levitical law levelled out the unequal footing between buyer and seller—sales went to members of the clan before the rest of the tribe. Those in trouble were to sell to their family instead of strangers: “If your brother becomes poor, and sells part of his property, then his next of kin shall come and redeem what his brother has sold” (Lev 25:25). If you’re in trouble, you sell to the one who has the longest standing goodwill for you.
Furthermore, the poor brother can, if he should ever make up the money, buy back what he lost from his family. He always has a right to reclaim the use of his productive property. And it is productive property that is the focus here: general assets are not included in this dispensation.
If a man sells a dwelling house in a walled city, he may redeem it within a whole year after its sale; for a full year he shall have the right of redemption. If it is not redeemed within a full year, then the house that is in the walled city shall be made sure in perpetuity to him who bought it, throughout his generations. (2)
The Levitical law is intent on economic well-being. A house in the city doesn’t make a living: it is shelter. Passive assets do not allow one to produce, and, as any homeowner knows, houses are hardly assets at all—they take too much money to maintain.
One could argue that a house could be rented out, but a society in which landlording was a common means of “producing” wealth would be a society tending towards the kind of money-economy that the law of God precisely suppressed.(3) The economic prosperity of Israel relies primarily on God Himself, in and through His gift of Creation. To obey His laws meant that His people relied on His continued gift more actively than on any techniques of amassment and sale. This is why His list of directives is followed with a promise of blessings on the land, rather than, say, on successful landlording or mercantile ventures:
If you walk in my statutes and observe my commandments and do them, then I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. And your threshing shall last to the time of vintage, and the vintage shall last to the time for sowing; and you shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land securely (Lev. 26:3–5).
If one’s plight worsens (he gambles too much or has the ancient equivalent of a huge hospital bill), then (presumably even after several such sales) his clan has to give him a loan. Unlike our society, in which human need is construed as an opportunity for profit, this loan is to be without interest (Lev. 25:36). If it isn’t enough, the needy will sell themselves as indentured servants to someone in their clan or their tribe (Lev. 25:39). But just as we are all loved and cared for as strangers and sojourners with God on His land, so shall the indentured servant be a “servant and as a sojourner” in the house of his brother (Lev. 25:40).
Already this appears to be a better system than what we have today. It is a system that champions the family (keeping productive property within a community of love, where the common good outweighs private profit) and relies on the clan over the tribe as the community with the strongest love. Model of subsidiarity though it is, it does not escape from the issue of people losing their productive property. God had a plan for this. Our society does not. To work within the servant-sector, without productive property, without owning a home or a car, and all for the profit of someone you do not know, is the typical form indentured servitude takes in modern America. Wages keep workers too close to survival to ever be able to redeem themselves by buying productive property; cultural norms have made ownership and inheritance, in contrast to a life of rent, nearly unimaginable.
To avoid the establishment of an economy of near-permanent servitude, God planned the Jubilee—the returning of property and the forgiving of debt. Every fifty years, every debt would be forgiven and everyone who sold his property or himself into another’s service, “shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family” (Lev. 25:10). It was a total reset of the entire system, a return to how the land was divided when the Israelites first settled Cana. So those who sold their productive property and were at the mercy of their brethren could once again become a productive member of society, even caring for others as they had been cared for.
The concept of a Jubilee year, a year of debt forgiveness, developed prior to the Levitical law codes. The Mesopotamian kingdoms of the bronze age record the first developed jubilee systems. Most frequently, when a new king came to power, he would cancel all debts in his kingdom in celebration of his new reign. Of course, this was a gift too big to be repaid. It spawned a fidelity in his people that could only develop through this form of gift-giving. But it also checked the power of “creditors, military leaders or local administrators from concentrating land in their own hands and taking the crop surplus for themselves at the expense of the tax collector” as Michael Hudson has explained. This did not mean that land was returned to the people, only that the wealthy were stunted from buying as much as they otherwise could in a free-market. Take for example the Edict of Ammusaduqa of 1626 BC:
Whosoever has given barley or silver to an Akkadian or an Amorite as an interest-bearing loan... and had a document executed, whereas the king instituted the misharum [a settling, rather than forgiving of debts] for the land, the creditor’s document is now voided; he may not collect the barley or silver on the basis of his document. (4)
The king was the functional landlord of his kingdom; everyone was in debt to him as he allowed them to reside upon it. When debts were forgiven, slaves would be freed, “debt-tablets” would be washed in water, and creditors would lose their claim on certain assets—all creditors except the king. Everyone was always in debt to him, and his claim on taxes would remain.
Most of the debts during this period (as well as those in the Greco-Roman world during the life of Christ) were caused by tax burdens. (5) As the empire would demand a certain percentage of profits that a farmer could not manage to pay, the farmer would then seek a loan from a wealthier man. This gave the wealthy a certain level of control and power over the weaker—one that created a felt sense of fidelity to him that could, in the eyes of the political sovereign, rival his own. In other words, the king would use debt-forgiveness to stomp out all competition for rival sovereigns, while causing the need for debt-forgiveness in the first place, through taxation. From a Hobbesian perspective, this makes complete sense: The sovereign is established by his perceived victory over all rival sovereigns. Through taxation, rival sovereigns are allowed a little room to grow; through jubilee, they are crushed, in a cyclical ritual whereby the ruler always appears as savior and victor over the ruled.
The Levitical code turned the haphazard, sovereign-decreed jubilees of the Mesopotamians into a regularized and dependable system, but still for a similar purpose: to ensure that no human sovereign became so strong and powerful that he rivaled and distracted people from bowing to the sovereignty of the true God. Unlike the Mesopotamian jubilees, the Jubilee of God’s law did not merely forgive tax debts—it returned productive property that no man had claim over. In contrast to the Near Eastern kings that claimed ownership of the land, God declares in Leviticus: “the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me.”
Without this gift of ownership, freedom from debt was not a complete freedom, only a freedom from the control of lesser, rival sovereigns. But through His law, God intended the Israelites to regain the position of their father Adam who, before the Fall, was commanded “to till it and keep” (Gen 2:15) the garden allotted to him. The “Redemption” system was only truly fulfilled when the forgiven family returned to the land that God ordained for them to have—to their larger family. This was not the use of debt for the accumulation of power, but a real release from its evil effects. It was freedom from not owning, not belonging, not providing, and living alienated in the land. “The end of history” Graeber writes in his book Debt, will “be that moment when all slates are wiped clean and all debts finally lifted when a great blast from angelic trumpets will announce the final Jubilee.” (6) The great analogy of Christian redemption from sin depends on an accurate understanding of this Jubilee: God does not merely forgive our debts, but in and through His salvific act, He welcomes us home, adopted members of His family, taking up residence in that garden that was to be ours in the beginning. The forgiveness of our sins is the great Jubilee of forgiving, slashing all accounts, and a restoration of human nature itself.
The Great Reset, such as it is, is an attempt to revive the pagan jubilee. “You won’t own anything, and you’ll be happy”—the slogan of the movement is as succinct a description of Mesopotamian redemption as one could hope to find: your debts will be forgiven, but in and through a greater dependence on other men; you will not be restored to ownership; you will not be restored to the land; you will rent everything from the powerful in a spirit of servile thanksgiving.
This is a misreading of the Scriptures, but it is an unfortunately understandable one: It is nearly impossible for us to imagine a debt-forgiveness that is performed freely and out of love, rather than out of the desire for gain. That debt-forgiveness was spawned from a subversive desire for gain is obvious in the pagan world (the king gains his apparent sovereignty against those who rival it), and it should be obvious in our own attempts to promote some partial Jubilee (by which banks, big businesses, and the state gain their own, as I’ll show in Part II). But this theological pessimism does not take into account the power of the sacraments; it doubts their true efficacy in rendering hearts generous; it assumes that nothing will be done except through the market manipulation of the profit-motive. This is a theological error. The Christian is called to be in the eschaton now, to usher in the new Jerusalem. As St. Bonaventure says, “Our spirit is made hierarchical in order to mount upward, according to its conformity to the heavenly Jerusalem which no man enters unless it first descend into his heart through grace.” St. Thomas agrees, suggesting that the profit-motive is a mere perversion of the impulse that “inheres in everyone’s spirit to seek their own good,” as the good we seek is only “beatitude[, which] is the reward for virtue.” We do not need to live in the muck of sin, compensating for it until Christ returns in glory. Christ returns, albeit veiled, every day: the Mass is the beginning of the eschaton; redemption—the wiping of sinful slates and the restoration to belonging to one another, to the land, and to God—starts now. We can forgive debts as we have been forgiven.
But can our nation really forgive all debts, and do so as Christians, rather than as pagans? Is that even financially possible? Part II will deal with that question.
[2] Catholic Biblical Association (Great Britain), The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (New York: National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, 1994), Le 25:29–30.
[3] In my recent article for issue 2 of New Polity Magazine I argued that the Levitical law favors in kind exchange and attempts to suppress the ubiquitous use of money by disincentivization, as when men must add a fifth to any tithe paid in silver, as opposed to produce. (Lev. 27:31)
[4] J. J. Finkelstein, “Edict of Ammusaduqa: A New Text” in Revue d'Assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale 63.1 (1969): 45-64, §4.
[5] Throughout the scholastic tradition, there is consistent argument made that indirect taxation (taxes that do not go directly to a civic project but to a general fund, as all ours do in the US), were unjust and illicit. For instance, see Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John: Chapters 1–21, trans. Fabian Larcher and James A. Weisheipl, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 125; Nichole Oresme, De Moneta, 16: “A monopoly or an indirect tax… of any public necessity is unjust” (monopolium seu gabella [indirect tax] … rei necessarie communitati iniusta est).
[6] David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011), 82.