Our Redemption Comes With No Barcode
Photo by Elibet Valencia Munoz on Unsplash
Recently, I saw a man wearing a brilliant white t-shirt with a large barcode printed on the front. On the top of the shirt was the word “Redeemed” and the bottom had 1 Corinthians 1:30. Curious, I looked up the verse to read.
It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. (NIV)
As a Senior Consultant at Vandersall Collective, I work with faith communities and their leaders around issues of fundraising and philanthropy; in the church, we often call this stewardship. In this work, theologies of money, economics, and debt feature prominently, both at the forefront and more often in the background, powerfully shaping the conversations. These theologies and deeply held beliefs are often unnamed and unnoticed (at least to the untrained eye), because in our culture and everyday life we too often have given short shrift to the hard work of understanding why we believe what we believe and what shapes our foundational values and deeply held convictions around so many important issues, not least of which is money.
They shifted from an economy of mystery to the mystery of economy.
This is as true in the church as it is anywhere else – perhaps even more so. Much of my work is in leading individuals, groups, and institutions into recognizing their money narratives and unpacking how they came to believe what it is they believe when it comes to finances. What I’ve learned, perhaps ironically, is that so much of our cultural assumptions, unspoken beliefs, and even practices around money have roots in the theologies of the Christian tradition.
The words redemption and debt certainly have modern implications, but atonement theories as well as various Christologies have also relied on debt language to describe Christ’s relationship to humanity and/or redemption thereof. I invite you to consider your own narratives as we walk through a brief history of these words.
The etymological roots of debt is derived from the Latin verb debere, which means to owe. Its stem is the term de habere, or to have, to hold, to seize or to keep away from someone. Theological notions around debt, like their etymological roots, find their beginning in Roman antiquity. Christians living before 300 CE imagined God’s redemptive power over creation as being akin to an ordered household, an oikos (from the Greek word for household). If the oikos (either traditionally understood or that of the imperial court) was the foundation for Christian theology, then the oikonomia, quite literally, described how the household was ordered and managed. It became the realm through which Christians understood the mechanics of how God functioned and how God might relate to humanity:
“Moses was faithful as a servant in all God’s house [oikos],” bearing witness to what would be spoken by God in the future. But Christ is faithful as the Son over God’s house [oikos]. And we are his house [oikos], if indeed we hold firmly to our confidence and the hope in which we glory. (Hebrews 3:5-6, NIV)
This grace was given me: to preach to the Gentiles the boundless riches of Christ, and to make plain to everyone the administration [oikonomia] of this mystery, which for ages past was kept hidden in God, who created all things. (Ephesians 3:8-9, NIV)
However, in the fourth century, there was a legal shift wherein Christianity moved from persecuted sect to the imperial faith. With this shift, we see how the language of money and economics make its way to teachings of salvation. Theologians like Hippolytus and Tertullian utilized economic language when interpreting Paul’s teachings. They shifted from an economy of mystery to the mystery of economy. At this point, the concept of oikonomia ceased to be an analogy for the divine household, in favor of the language of money. Economy instead ordered the kingdom of God. Many theologians subsequent to the 4th century identify Jesus as the currency, the payment to the problem of human sin.
But, what does it mean to resist the empire and the way it invades our language and our understanding of God? What would it look like if we unhooked the language of money away from how we view our souls, our bodies, our relationship to one another and God?
If the Christian story is to be a counternarrative and an alternative way of life, rather than a superficial endorsement or reiteration of the world as it is, knowing these connections and the foundational theologies of debt is essential. We must be willing to examine and interrogate these theologies and pull from them new ways expressing our relationship to God and one another, being in our oikos, today.
