The Prophet on Profit (Evil Geniuses Series)
Photo by Jake Allen on Unsplash
This is the fifth in a series of posts where Dr. Brueggemann reflects on the book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen. Read the previous posts here.
In his remarkable, important book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History (2020), Kurt Andersen has traced the planning of a political party to take over the government. Near the end of his book, Andersen lists eight claims in the playbook that he believes generate their action. It is my intention in this and following weekly blogs to take up each of these eight claims and to consider how we may in good faith respond to them. I have no doubt that such a careful pointed response to each of these distortions is an effort worth making. I will take up each claim in turn.
The fifth claim is that short-term profits are everything. It seems obvious enough that this claim is pernicious. The singular passionate pursuit of profit is destructive of serious honest human interaction, and serves to reduce other human beings to tradable, dispensable commodities.
The strategies for short-term profit are manifold and mostly obvious—high interest rates, manipulation of debt, low wages, corporate buyouts, and insistence on deregulation in order to permit exploitation. Such a singular pursuit of profit transforms the market from a forum for commerce into a regulatory system that marches to the tune of those who have the most leverage. The most extreme examples of such profit-seeking include corporate raiders like Carl Icahn and the way in which corporate managers like Jack Welch can game the system, on which see The Man Who Broke the Market by David Gelles. The cost of such greed is the destruction of the neighbor and the disappearance of the neighborhood, so that every would-be neighbor becomes either a competitor in the chase for money, or a tool to be utilized for profit.
It is a truism that the covenantal-prophetic tradition of the Bible (as well as the sapiential tradition) advocates for the maintenance and sustenance of neighborliness in ways that limit and guard against the pursuit of profit. The church in general has too long been preoccupied with “spiritual matters” and “life-after-death” to give adequate attention to the matter of money as a potential for community wellbeing, as well as a threat to community wellbeing. I have been educated about the church’s focus on money—or recognition of money as an issue for faith—by the remarkable study of the historian, Peter Brown, Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (2012). Brown shows in plodding detail that the early church and its bishops were primarily preoccupied with delivering protective care to needy persons without resources. Such an accent contradicts our propensity to imagine that the early church and its bishops spent all of their time and energy articulating and refining the “Chalcedonian formula” concerning the Trinity. To the contrary, Brown chronicles the sustained effort of the bishops of the church to attend to the distribution and redistribution of much needed economic resources.
But all of that changed, says Brown, in the fifth and sixth centuries when wealthy people began to participate in and then to dominate the church in its more established mode. With that changed population, energy shifted from care for the poor to the self-preoccupation of erecting extravagant mausoleums as tributes wealthy persons built for themselves. One by-product of this was that the priests of the church took on an other-worldly role with haircuts to exhibit their other-worldly calling. Brown’s book is enough to see that a dispute over money lies at the heart of issues concerning the nature, character, and mission of the church. And of course that dispute continues concerning the call of Christ’s church to be fully and faithfully the “church of the poor.” As a way into such critical thinking about the matter of money in the church, attention may be paid to Eight Century Prophets: A Social Analysis (2003) by D. N. Premnath. His book focuses particularly on land accumulation and acquisition by wealthy people in the eighth century BCE, a process that caused the displacement of vulnerable people without social leverage. And the process of displacement of vulnerable people continues among us, on large scale through colonialization.
There are many texts that might be a reference point for the refutation of this right-wing commitment to short-term profits. I have decided to consider, as a focal point of study, the poetic piece of Jeremiah 5:26-31. In this poetic utterance the prophet Jeremiah follows a standard genre that includes an indictment for violation of Torah and an anticipated sentence as punishment for the violation.
The indictment the prophet issues concerns “scoundrels” (evil-doers):
For scoundrels are found among my people;
They take over the goods of others.
Like fowlers they set a trap;
they catch human beings.
Like a cage full of birds,
their houses are full of treachery;
therefore they have become great and rich,
they have grown fat and sleek.
They know no limits in deeds of wickedness;
they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper,
and they do not defend the rights of the needy (Jeremiah 5:26-29).
Verses 25-26a describe their predatory action whereby they “catch human beings.” The charge lacks specificity, but the context indicates that they practice economic seizure in ways that reduce their victims (and targets of predation) to helplessness. The imagery suggests stealth and deception, practices that are ruthless, and policies that are covert. We can readily list the sorts of sharp dealing that were in play that reduced their targets to helplessness.
The result is the accumulation of great wealth. The poetry heaps up terms of negative characterization: great/rich/fat/sleek! These wealthy are so well off with toned bodies that never toil or sweat, living off the work of others. That accumulation of ill-gotten wealth, moreover, has stark social consequences:
They do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper,
and they do not defend the rights of the needy (v. 28).
The poetry appeals to the standard carriers of economic vulnerability, “orphans and needy.” From this pair, we may infer the rest of the roster of the vulnerable including “widows and immigrants,” all of those without protective advocacy in a patriarchal system. The courts are rigged so that those sorts of people are without advocacy or protection, with no assured rights. The practice is an economy that is so tilted toward the powerful and the wealthy that there is no prospect or hope for any of the others. Such a characterization of the economy fits perfectly with the mantra “short-term profits.” “Short-term” means no worry about or consideration of long-term social reality. No matter beyond immediate satiation and self-indulgence, all made possible by the manipulation of economic policy and practice.
The “sentence” that follows the indictment in verse 29 is implied but not directly stated:
Shall I not punish these things? says the Lord,
and shall I not bring retribution on a nation such as this? (v. 29)
In disbelieving indignation, Jeremiah has God ask two questions:
Shall I not punish?
Shall I not bring retribution?
The questions are left unanswered by the poet. Nonetheless, we know the answer, because we know the ancient tradition and the track record of this Lord of emancipation. We have known the answer since the earlier moments of covenantal self-declaration. We have known the answer since the disclosure of Moses in the tradition of Deuteronomy:
You must not distort justice; you must not show partiality; and you must not accept bribes, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of those who are in the right. Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue, so that you may live and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you (Deuteronomy 16:19-20).
That tradition, moreover, knows in preview the same triad of the vulnerable to which justice urgently pertains: widows, orphans, and immigrants (Deuteronomy 10:18, 14:29, 16:11, 14, 24:17, 19, 26:12-13). Thus Jeremiah intends that Israel should readily and intuitively know the answer to YHWH’s two questions:
Yes...you shall punish those who seek short-term profit at the expense of the vulnerable;
Yes…you shall take retribution on such a community of predators.
There is no uncertainty, according to the prophet, because Israel lives in a world that is governed by the Lord who attends exactly to the needs of the vulnerable. The self-serving “scoundrels” of usurpatious greed are on a collision course with that non-negotiable governance. It took the rest of the Book of Jeremiah and a few more years of history in Jerusalem for the answer of punishment and retribution to become clear. But here the die is already cast for the city. The judgment of God against those who practice “unjust gain” generates certain unbearable consequences.
In our context it requires little imagination to see that the endless, unrestrained exercise of land and wealth accumulation in the pursuit of control, comfort, and security can only have negative outcomes. The poet knows, as does the entire prophetic tradition, that the divine response of punishment and retribution is not direct and super-spectacular. Rather, it is the slow grind of creation and history that works its retaliation on such a society in relentless ways.
Verses 30-31 appear to be a response to the foregoing that is perhaps uttered upon further reflection. The society addressed by the poet is now host to outcomes that are utterly shocking, outcomes one could never have imagined in the holy, blessed city. The most affrontive outcome imaginable is that the religious leadership should fail:
Prophets prophesy falsely,
Priests rule and preside over the treachery.
Finally it comes down to religious leadership that has sold out and is nothing more than a cowardly echo of the dominant values of exploitation. Israel should indeed be shocked when its religious leaders are no longer capable of or willing to tell the hard truth rooted in the ancient tradition. So now among us, much of the religious community and its leadership have become a ready echo of uncaring distortion. And then the poet tells us why the religious leadership is so compromised:
My people love to have it so!
The prophet and priest simply respond to societal wishes and expectations. Such a sell-out puts the community in an impossible situation, so impossible that the poet in the last line wonders,
What will you do when the end comes? (v. 31)
The word translated “end” is “otherwise.” What will you do when it is otherwise among you? What will you do when circumstances change dramatically? The poet sees that Israel and its religious leaders are ill-prepared for the big trouble that is to come. Israel has made no preparation and has given no thought to the coming trouble.
The matter is left unspecified. In the remainder of the book of Jeremiah, we learn that this unbearable otherwise to come is the onslaught of Babylon for which Israel is completely unprepared. In our time and place, this ominous sure-to-come “otherwise” is left without specification or articulation. It is easy enough to extrapolate that this coming “end” in our context (“Otherwise”) is the environmental crisis. However that may be, it is self-evident that an economy passionately committed to short-term profit is quite unprepared for “otherwise.” It is the bid of this poetry that the community turns its attention away from short-term profit, away from more individual self-sufficiency, away from the delivery of more consumer goods, away from the endless development of tools for control and comfort in order to notice the reality of a world where the God who governs will not be mocked. In this demanding poetry, the “yes” of punishment and the “yes” of retribution are unremarkable. And now we are left to parse the poetry to see how it works on our lips, to see how it feels in our eyes, and to see how it may help us to a new inescapable attentiveness. In a monetized society like ancient Jerusalem (or in our own), the act of such poetic otherwise is urgent. Jeremiah hoped that even among the false-speaking prophets and ill-governing priests there would be some faithful witnesses to “otherwise.”
An addendum: Jesus is one of the heirs to the tradition of truth-telling. Concerning the practice of short-term profit, Jesus makes his stance clear in the most succinct way:
You cannot serve God and wealth (Matthew 6:24).
In the Gospel of Luke this same statement is a poetic conclusion after his parable of the cunning estate manager (Luke 16:13). This is a radical either/or. For the most part, most of us seek to have it both ways without choosing: God and money! The governing term is “serve.” It is one thing to need money or to have money. It is a very different thing to “serve” money. That verbal usage suggests that the purpose of one’s life is to exalt money, to hold it in honor, and so to organize one’s life, one’s effort and one’s imagination to do what it requires. The alternative here is a God whose long-term intent is the wellbeing of the vulnerable neighbors—widows, orphans, and immigrants. In the end, it is an either/or. Jesus knew, as Jeremiah knew before him, that the future of the community consists in getting this either/or correct. The passion for short-term profit is based on a trouble-bringing choice. The wonder is that we already know the alternative. The work now is to mobilize the courage and sensibility to make the societal choice that must be made in order that the coming “otherwise” can be life-giving and not death-dealing. It is the pivot of this single, direct either/or that is the subject matter of the priests who govern well, and of the prophets who tell the truth.
In the wake of this stark either/or of Jesus, it is no wonder that the early church could host this truth in its epistolary corpus:
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains (I Timothy 6:10).
It is not money that is the problem. It is the “love of money,” a phrase that Jesus rendered as “serve money.” In the antecedent verse “Paul” writes of such greed:
But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction (v. 9).
Such “senseless and harmful desires” may plunge the entire community into “ruin and destruction.” The good, hard, demanding news is that it can and must be otherwise. As Jeremiah knew in his time, we in our time know that our time is short indeed! It is no wonder that we have ringing in our ears the unanswered question of Jesus:
For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? (Mark 8:36; Matthew 6:21-28, Luke 9:21-27).
What indeed?!!!
Walter Brueggemann
August 5, 2022
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles. He continues to be a highly sought-after speaker.
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