Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Mercy Not Sacrifice

Home
About
My Book
Archives
More
- Theology
- Culture
- Politics
- Sermons
- Bible
- Devotions
- Daily Office
- Podcast

Home
Progressive Christian
Sin and the Rules of the Market

Sin and the Rules of the Market

Last updated on: January 24, 2020 at 8:58 am by Morgan Guyton

Sin and the Rules of the Market 2020-01-24T08:58:37-05:00 Morgan Guyton

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

[Moms for Housing press conference in Oakland]

A couple of weeks ago, a Calvinist bro on Twitter was talking about how liberation theologian James Cone was a heretic because he defined sin in an “unbiblical” way. So it got me thinking about how I define sin. And then I started thinking about the homeless mothers in Oakland who were violently evicted from a vacant investment property they had been squatting in. And the question came to mind: who was sinning? The mothers who broke into somebody else’s property or the real estate company whose actions helped drive affordable housing out of Oakland? I’m pretty sure that “biblical” Christians would answer the question differently than I would.

So what is sin? I tend to define it as any human behavior that contradicts God’s purpose of establishing perfect harmony and belonging throughout his creation (which is how I would define the biblical concept of shalom). Sin can be individual or collective. It can be intentional or the result of negligence. It’s rarely the case that sin happens in a way where blame is clear-cut and easy to assign. It’s usually a spider web of complicated personalities and social forces interacting in ways that can be justified but result in harm and further sin.

Many Christians define sin straightforwardly as breaking the rules, especially breaking a rule that is explicitly laid forth in scripture. The problem with this definition is that the choices we make in life usually involve deciding between different sets of rules, even between different rules that we find in scriptures. When we break one rule, it’s almost always because we’re following another rule that seems to trump it.

How would a rule-following German Christian in the early twentieth century resist the Holocaust? Often breaking rules that are unjust and harmful to humanity require trumping them with rules that seem soft, abstract, and unenforceable, like “love your neighbor as yourself.” What Jesus calls “the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith” seem open to myriad possible interpretation, which means they can be cast aside for less costly, more straightforward rules, like commands to “tithe mint, dill, and cumin” (Matthew 23:23).

For the apostle Paul, sin is not so much a transgression against a rule as it is a master rule-maker whose rules contradict God’s plan to establish a harmonious, loving world where everyone belongs. In Romans 6, Paul says that the greatest gift of God’s grace is that we no longer have to be “slaves of sin,” which is to say that we no longer have to follow the rules that sin gives us. Instead we can be obedient to the love that inspires us to live with a mercy that breaks all the rules imposed by a sin-saturated world.

In our age, the most ubiquitous rule-maker that exists is the market. The market gives us rules about every aspect of our behavior. Many of the college students on the campuses where I work are thoroughly obedient to the laws of the market. They know the rules of the ironic banter that regulate their speech, their jokes, and under what circumstances they are allowed to be “extra.” They know the rules for fashion combinations they are allowed to wear to class and under what circumstances they can get away with sweatpants. They know what chemicals they are expected to put in their bodies every weekend. They know the rules for how they are supposed to interact with strangers they’ve slept with when they see them on the sidewalk the week after.

All the things college students do that cause the older generations to gasp are simply following rules that govern a different social propriety. It is simply not accurate to see college students as rebelling against the social rules of prior generations so much as they are obeying a different set of social rules that have been imposed on them by advertising, social media trends, and peer pressure. The college students who rebel against the rules are the ones who do things like go to art galleries on a weekend evening instead of the fraternity keg party.

My youngest son thinks it’s a rule that he has to finish whatever game he starts on the X-Box. This rule trumps the rule that when Dad tells you to stop, you stop right away. It’s not so much that he’s rebelling against my authority, but that he truly believes something about the universe will be violated if he stops before the end of the game. In some cases, this actually does involve betraying his “team” of fellow players on the Internet, as he’s explained to me.

I used to think it was a rule that I had to consume two large glasses of wine (and sometimes a fair bit more) in order to effectively write a blog post. The wine was supposedly a necessary tool to help me relax. Nothing in the Bible told me that I couldn’t or shouldn’t do this (or at least whatever the Bible had to say could be easily rationalized away). But on March 16, 2016, a voice said to me, “You really don’t have to drink,” and I accepted the invitation and have been sober ever since.

Many of the problematic rules I’ve described so far are relatively innocuous, though addictive, compulsive behavior is certainly the root of all sorts of other harm. But what about the rules of the market that aren’t just social norms that compel obedience but the structural boundaries of our economic system and our sense of what’s even possible in the “real world”?

What about the rule that says whatever profit I make as a stockholder in a company that cheats its workers is my money, fair and square, and those workers who have been cheated have no recourse against me even if my profit was taken directly out of their pockets?

What about the rule that says homeless women are trespassing when they take over a house that is a vacant investment property in a city full of vacant investment properties instead of saying that real estate companies are stealing valuable land and shelter from cities whose taxpaying, voting residents are being squeezed out into the streets?

The homeless mothers squatting the property in Oakland were arrested and violently removed from the home (thankfully they’ve since been able to negotiate an opportunity to buy the property). Wedgewood Properties, which owns the house, is a national home-flipping conglomerate, which buys thousands of foreclosed and other properties for cheap, repaints them, raises the price dramatically, and lets them sit until somebody can afford them. One of the homeless moms said there are four times as many vacant properties in Oakland as there are homeless people.

In biblical Israel, the existence of empty investment properties amidst a shortage of affordable housing would be understood as a mockery of God even if there wasn’t a specific Torah commandment about affordable housing. The prophet Isaiah says, “Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land” (Isaiah 5:8). But that verse is not a “Thou shalt not.” So it presumably doesn’t have any authority to the type of Christian who talks about “biblical authority” but believes that the laws of the market are “just the way things are,” and the Bible has nothing to say about them.

So who is the sinner in the case of these homeless women? It might be easy for a “biblical” Christian to conclude straightforwardly the sinner is the one who trespasses and uses someone else’s private property, even if that property belongs to an anonymous real estate company that has thousands of vacant investment properties. In this view, homelessness and poverty are unfortunate circumstances at best and a result of presumably irresponsible, immoral living at worst. The idea that there’s any semblance of collective moral responsibility for the survival of individual citizens is understood to be secular socialist nonsense.

To me, this mindset actually illustrates the entrenched power of sin that the apostle Paul wrote about. Our greedy, sin-soaked market creates rules that establish “just the way things are” and our society’s wealthy investors and homeowners go about their lives without an inkling of conflict in their consciences. Sin is deadly when it tells us that we can’t live any differently because it’s too complicated and it’s not our fault anyway.

To my understanding, that is precisely the state of moral suffocation that the apostle Paul believes we must be liberated from. As much as we want the rules the market gives us about private property to be categorically morally distinct from the rules the market gives us about casual sex and alcohol consumption, they are all intertwined together in the same mass-engineered reality called capitalism. Being liberated from sin means to be liberated from obedience to “the way things are.”

This isn’t to say that having a free market is innately evil. There are certainly worse ways to organize an economy. We just need to be vigilant and aware of the ways that rules are constantly being imposed on us by forces other than God that define the boundaries of what we think is possible. It’s easy for many “biblical” Christians to bracket off economic activity as being outside the purview of moral analysis (even though there are many very explicit teachings in the Bible concerning how resources are distributed and how poor people are treated).

If our duty as Christians is not merely to secure a happy afterlife for ourselves and people we evangelize, but to work for a world in which God’s desire for harmony and belonging is manifested fully (a.k.a. living in the kingdom of God), then we need to be involved in challenging and breaking the rules of the market that hurt people. This may include squatting a house or supporting people who do, even though trespassing is still wrong in many circumstances.

Sin is not primarily rebellion against rules. Sin is primarily obedience to rules that defy God’s love. It’s somewhat arbitrary for me to say that, because rebellion to one thing is always obedience to another. But I think it’s more productive to think of sin as an impostor rule-maker that stands in the place of God and against which God has to lead a revolt through Jesus.

There are plenty of laws and rules in our world that are good and valid; there are also laws and rules (written and unwritten) that straightjacket us into thinking the world cannot be a place of perfect harmony and belonging. I really think the rules that suffocate our imagination are the sin that Jesus died on the cross to liberate us from, whether they manifest themselves in traditionally understood immorality or the selfishness the world tells us is respectable.

Previous Post

January 20, 2020

Dr. King On Cynicism

Next Post

February 1, 2020 Resisting Harm Is What Holiness Is For

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Advent Beauty Will Save the World Bible Big Picture: Ephesians Bloggers Book Christian salvation and the Beautitudes Culture Daily Office Danceable Homiletics Deadly Sins Deep Roots: Genesis Devotions Dominican Republic May 2011 El Principio Misericordia (The Mercy Principle) Five verses God tattooed on my heart Fundraising FutureGospel Good Biblical Words Henri Nouwen Interview Jennings' Christian Imagination Jesus inside the beltway Jesus Is My Candidate Jesus vs the Pharisees Jesus vs. Plato Journey to Eternity Looking Back on 2012 Love Actually Monday Merton Monday Merton Music Occupy the manger On Earth As It Is In Heaven Original Sin Podcast Poetry Politics Prayer Psalm 119 Radical Jesus 101 Reviews Sermon on the Mount Sermons Spanish Bible study Special Series Spiritual but not religious Synchroblog Theology Things that made me think Thomas a Kempis Ugliness Into Beauty Uncategorized Viaje Dominicano 2013 Walking in the Valley (Lent) Welcome: It's More than a Mat Wild Goose 2013 Wrestling

Select a Month March 2022 January 2022 December 2021 September 2021 April 2021 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

On which sea did Jesus calm a storm and walk on water?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Aegean Sea Red Sea Sea of Galilee Dead Sea