The Trouble With Economies Part One

These two posts are to address the notion of "economies," in religion and in the world; that is to say, these two posts are to address the notion of "economies" everywhere.  I will start with what is wrong with both types of economies--a fair premise, I believe, since the very "economy" connotation of "a house being in order" is heavy with undeserved praise.  An examination of "The Trouble With Economies" will shed light on the true implications of the term.

First, Christianity is shot through with ideas about the "salvation economy," by which it is held that Jesus' redeeming death has purchased salvation for those humans who are reckoned to obtain access to the bargain.  The problem with this view is not that it is entirely incorrect, but that it has been rendered--by the very emphasis placed on it--fundamentally inapplicable.  The Jesus whose death and resurrection saves the elect is the same Jesus through whom the world was created, and the same Jesus who experiences every suffering of Creation.  This is the same Jesus who dies every death in fallen Creation's unfeeling equation, and who experiences and performs every resurrection--a surprisingly commonplace occurrence, if the Gospels are to be trusted.

This Jesus of reality is a Jesus always living, always dying, and always resurrecting.  The Jesus of the "salvation economy" is a decidedly lower-order being, and this discounting of the true Jesus' nature is more than a simple blasphemy; it is a contravention of his true ministry.  No one is saved through a salvation economy; we must be saved through the operations of a salvific organism--an intrinsically Jesus-inhabited and Jesus-mediated kingdom.  If "inhabited" and "mediated" seem too humble terms for the Savior, it is only because Jesus in his nature and his utterances frames himself so--the Lord of All and the Servant of All.

Conversely, the King of the Salvation Economy is no king at all.  The Jesus of the Salvation Economy may be praised to the highest heavens, but the very logic of an economy places Jesus at a bargaining-table, dealing out salvations and damnations for people as against some corners of existence which--most perversely--might be held to possess competing claims--as though such claimants could exist in a universe created through Jesus.

This, then, is the contrast at hand: Jesus of The Salvation Economy, purchasing our salvation through the Resurrection, or Jesus of the Universal Organism, inhabiting a Kingdom that ministers continually to sentient Creation through justice and mercy.  In a  certain sense, the distinction between the two framings is not all that great--if one is willing to risk misjudging Jesus' relationship to Creation.

It would perhaps be worth wondering, though, if Jesus' ministry of salvation is not contravened by failure to understand its essential architecture.  Countless generations have been assured--with greater or lesser success--that A Salvation Economy has been instituted by Jesus' death on the Cross and subsequent triumphant Resurrection.  Countless generations have subsumed their understanding of that portrayal to Jesus' declaration in John 16:33: "I have overcome the world" (KJV).

Jesus, of course, said that before the Resurrection, not after.