Sabbath-Jubilee economics: a biblical response to economic globalization and the international debt crisis.

Since the 1980s, "economic globalization" has been a harsh fact of life for people around the world. Some believe globalization is just a description of how the global economy is becoming more integrated through increased trade liberalization and by allowing a more unrestricted role for markets. Many political and economic leaders unquestioningly apply this ideology as the universal economic prescription. One indication of how prescriptions of economic globalization have failed is the debt crisis facing some of the poorest countries in the world.

In order to pay these unjust debts now totaling some US$2.2 trillion, poor countries are being forced by international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization to restructure the entire economies. The consequences of these structural adjustment programs (SAPs) has been dramatic. Millions of people have suffered and died in order to make these payments. Between 1981 and 1998, poor nations have paid back US$3 trillion. For every new dollar received, almost two dollars is paid back to rich countries in interest and amortization. Many of these nations continue to pay the debt service at the expense of the well being of their people.

The harshest effects have often been born by women. Debt crisis has meant cuts to many publicly supported services. It is estimated that 13 children die every minute as debt servicing sucks money out of health care and education. For example, Mauritania, one of the poorest countries pays 4.5 times more for debt servicing than it does on health care. Uganda spends US$50 million on debt even though it has the highest HIV transmission rate in the world. As these services disappear, it is women who must assume the additional responsibility for child care, education and health care. In addition, more women have entered the paid workforce in the globalized economy, yet the jobs they have are often not at a living wage that enables them to provide for their families. They are usually the first affected by an economic slowdown. In too many situations women do not even enjoy the basic protection of minimal labour standards.

At the G7 meetings in Cologne in 1999, rich nations promised US$ 100 billion in debt relief. Yet to date a mere US$ 15 billion has been delivered to only nine countries. Many of the failed economic prescriptions of globalization including structural adjustment, are still being pressed on poorer nations now with the ironic title of `poverty reduction strategies'.

Is there a different course to take?

We find such an alternative in the Bible in the theme of the Sabbath Jubilee. It is most notable in Leviticus 25 and in the account of the Exodus. Jesus proclaims in his inaugural sermon recorded in Luke 4, "the year of the Lord's favor" (Jubilee). Sabbath Jubilee provides not only a critique but an alternative to the false promises of globalization. For many Christians there are at least three fundamental problems with the reliance on globalization strategies to address this debt crisis; the bondage of people, the lack of a vision, and the loss of freedom.

Liberation from Bondage to be Different

Globalization destroys peoples' humanity. In this impoverished view, people are driven solely by self-interest and are valued for what they consume in the global economy. As one writer has so aptly commented, "The seven cardinal sins have become the seven cardinal virtues of the new economy." Culture, politics, and social life are held hostage to the impulses of their utility to the market.

Bondage is not a new human experience even though the specific form it takes may be. The crushing oppression of bondage ranges from destructive, broken and violent personal relationships to the systemic forms of bondage such as international debt where countries are forced to sacrifice their people to pay for debts incurred unjustly. Regardless of its cause, bondage destroys the human spirit and is an offense to God because it violates the inherent dignity of people lovingly made in the Creator's image.

The Hebrews were in bondage to the super power of their day. Egypt was founded on the belief that Pharaoh was God and that it was the duty of all in society to serve the Pharaoh. The Hebrews, having been delivered from starvation by the wisdom and generosity of Joseph, found themselves as slaves at the very bottom of Egyptian. society. Egypt was a hierarchical society, a meritocracy where only the powerful had value and where only Pharaoh and the leaders really mattered. Everyone else was expendable. Our world has similar tragic parallels today. God's dramatic intervention to deliver the people of Israel from Egyptian slavery into a new land is not just a story about liberation from bondage and oppression. More importantly, liberation is about having a new identity and being a different people. The Exodus was God's social experiment in building an alternative community, where it was the responsibility of even the leaders to serve God not as embodied in a Pharaoh, but as God embodied in part in every person who thereby had an inherent dignity and was to be assured a place within the community.

Such a new social project is not without problems. God understands that left to our own inclinations, human pride, arrogance and self-centredness will distort the Sabbath-Jubilee Community. Inequalities will re-emerge and be perpetuated. Meritocracies can quickly be re-established by those in positions of privilege. Power can easily be concentrated in the hands of the political and the wealthy. Over time the exclusion and oppression of Egypt will be restored. Women know only too well how easily such concentrations of wealth and power can lead to exclusion and renewed repression. Certainly this was also true in the history of Israel. Thus, it is not coincidental that the Jubilee year began on the most holiest of days the Day of Atonement. The word Jubilee in fact originates from the Hebrew word for the horn the "jobel" that was to be sounded calling the nation to confess their failings before God. By heralding the Jubilee year on the day of atonement, God sent a powerful reminder that human societies even under God's guidance can lose their way and need to have the complex web of relationships between people and the land restored.

The Sabbath-Jubilee begins by having people remember that they have been in bondage. Sabbath observance is about remembering you are those chosen by God for deliverance from oppression in Egypt. Again and again, God continually reminds the Hebrews of who they are under this new covenant "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the Land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery..... You know the heart of the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." (Exodus 20:2ff). Bondage is a denial of the fundamental dignity of people destroying their identity. Those who intensely remember their own deliverance are often those who are more open to the need for liberation. Today the crushing bondage of debt for millions of people is one that compels people of faith to call for liberation through its cancellation in order that we might create a different world.

Remembering a Different Future

Globalization is about a process, not about a vision for the future. There is no destination on this economic journey. The Book of Proverbs rightly cautions, "Where there is no vision the people perish" (29:18). Unlike globalization, the Exodus event has a destination and the promise of a new land and a new opportunity to create a different community.

God instructs the Hebrews through the commandments (Torah) on the nature of this new community. One of the central instructions is for the community to observe a "Sabbath." a weekly Sabbath every seventh day, the Sabbath year every seventh year, and the super-Sabbath, the year of jubilee every 50th year. "Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a Sabbath for the LORD." (Leviticus 25:2) Sabbath Jubilee is the distinguishing mark of God's new alternative community. The Hebrews were a chosen people destined for a different future. They were no longer slaves but had a new vocation not to merely re-create Egypt in the new land, but rather to create an alternative to Egypt.

Jesus heralded this same vision as the basis for his public ministry in using the words from Isaiah for his first sermon, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." (Luke 4)Those who heard Jesus were under no illusion about the meaning of the year of the Lord's favour. To them it meant the forgiveness of real debts. The Sabbath Jubilee vision of a world community provides a different destination characterized by justice for the poor, inclusion for the forgotten, and the acknowledgement that it requires a restoration and renewal of the complex web of relationships between God, people and Creation to get there.

Freedom to Choose

Globalization today is treated as inevitable and irreversible. Leaders tell people, "There is no choice, other alternative." Such an economic fatalism offers only an economics of despair and robs people of their hope for the future, robs people of their moral and ethical inclinations to make non-economic choices that embody love for their neighbour and justice for their communities. Douglas Meeks points out that we often read the Bible through "political metaphors." We refer to God as "Sovereign" or speak of the "Reign of God." Sabbath Jubilee portrays God as the "Great Economist." The formal economy as it is so often described must be placed with the larger context of God's greater economy. It is not merely blind preoccupation with consumption, production, and wealth accumulation. God's Great Economy provides for all. It defies human greed and self-interest. The Great Economy or the "Oikos" is the extravagant way persons live in the world in right relation to their family, their neighbours, the state, the market, nature, and God. The "Oikos" or Great Economy is a more realistic and fulfilling vision which centres on the promotion of life. Sabbath-Jubilee Economics offers an economics of hope because it is committed to an economics of life.

Economics of Enough

In Exodus, God provides some very specific directions for this approach to an economics of life. Wandering in the wilderness, frightened to be sure by their narrow escape from the most powerful army in the world and their very survival threatened because they have nothing to eat, God provides manna and quails for the Hebrews. It is here that we find God's first economic directive, the economics of enough. Every family is told to gather just enough bread (manna)for their needs. We read, "Those who gathered more had no surplus, and those who gathered less had no shortage"(Exodus 16:16-18). Market driven economics has an infinite tolerance for gross disparities as the response of rich nations to the crisis of debt so tragically illustrates. God's principle here is one of sufficiency. God provides enough for all. Even today there are enough resources to provide for everyone if there was a more just distribution.

Economics of Equality

This leads us to God's second important economic directive, the economics of equality. God instructs the Hebrews that in collecting the manna they should take just enough for their needs, the bread should not be "stored up" (Exodus 16:19-20). Egypt was a society of surpluses. God was painfully aware that surpluses inevitably lead to a concentration of wealth and power. Such concentrations can lead to greater and greater concentrations of idolatrous political, economic, military, social and religious power. Today, from the `crony capitalists' who steal the wealth to the `casino capitalists' who speculate to take wealth, the outcome is the same. The growing global inequality reveals that hierarchies and meritocracies are being re-created and people are losing their valued place in the community.

Economics of Rest

The third biblical economic directive is the economics of rest. The economics of rest is an instruction foundational to the Sabbath Discipline. Exercising the freedom to observe the Sabbath discipline in not merely a break from human work in the relentless cycle of production, but it is also a leap of faith by which people demonstrate their confidence that this is God's creation, not ours to own and exploit solely for the gain of this generation. Observing Sabbath Jubilee even imperfectly is a means of establishing a pattern of behaviour different from that of the world that allows people the freedom to choose a different course for our common future. In the face of the economics of despair created by unjust and unpayable debt the "great economist" offers an alternative--a sabbath Jubilee of life and hope. Hopelessness is not a new phenomenon. The biblical story is a rich account of God's continual deliverance of people from bondage to freedom, from despair to hope and from death to life. It is a love story of God's fidelity to people caught in the turbulance of an often brutal, at times confusing and often ambiguous world. Far from being just a nice idea or a noble goal, Sabbath Jubilee offers the global human community some concrete alternatives. The Jubilee 2000 Campaign has brought together some 17 million people to sign a petition and campaign for the cancellation of these unjust debts. More importantly, it has and is creating new relationships between peoples in the north and south. Unlike the fatalism of globalization, the Jubilee campaign is holding up the promise of an alternative future characterized by justice, working to liberate millions from the economic bondage of debt that denies their dignity and challenging people and their governments to be free to make choices that are in the service of people and communities.

Dr. David Pfrimmer, Director
Lutheran Office for Public Policy,
Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada