Can Christians be bankers?

The parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18.23-35 is justly famous as an illustration of the gratuitousness of divine forgiveness. The debt of the first servant is larger than the entire GDP of multiple Roman provinces at the time (or so I have heard). Don't ask how this man had amassed such a debt; dodgy loans are apparently nothing new. Perhaps someone got a tasty commission and knew there was little regulatory oversight. But I digress...

The main point of the parable, however, is not the enormity of the debt forgiven the first servant, but the failure of that servant to treat his neighbour in the light of the forgiveness he himself had just received. It is a striking image of one of Jesus' central teachings: that we are to forgive others as we have been forgiven by our heavenly Father.

Yet listening to this parable in church last Sunday made me wonder: the image is financial; is the application also financial? That is, when Jesus warns against a failure to cancel the debts of one who cannot repay us and says that God will not forgive us if we do not forgive others, is he only talking about moral or relational debts? Are actual monetary debts excluded? I see no reason that they should be. And Jesus isn't talking about restructuring bad debts, or recovering what can be recovered. The entire debt is forgiven.

This is a profound teaching and would, it seems to me, effectively make it impossible for a Christian who takes the teaching of Christ seriously to work at any of the major banks. Thoughts?
I also cannot see how a Christian can work in (much of) the advertising industry either, but that is for other reasons and is perhaps a post for another day.

Our culture is not materialist enough

"It's been said often enough but it bears repeating, that in some ways – so far from being a materialist culture, we are a culture that is resentful about material reality, hungry for anything and everything that distances us from the constraints of being a physical animal subject to temporal processes, to uncontrollable changes and to sheer accident."

- Rowan Williams, Ethics, Economics and Global Justice.

Matter matters to God. Christians are not anti-materialist (though we may be anti-consumerist). Williams identifies here an important dynamic in our attitude towards the good things in life. We do not actually enjoy them. We generally do not stop and give thanks, nurture contentment and joy with the good gifts we already have, but rush on to acquire more, consume more, experience more, as though if only by accumulating enough we can somehow transcend the fact that we have limits. It is not possible to have every experience, to hoard every treasure, to play with every toy. Let us enjoy what we have and be content.

For Williams, so much comes down to whether we will admit our creaturely status or whether we will continue to try to be gods. To put it another way: will we face reality and embrace the good gift of mere humanity? If we will, then we are free to drop the pretense of invulnerability and our delusions of control and finality and embrace responsibility on a human scale.

A miracle in Sydney

World Youth Day miracle recorded by mainstream press.

Jesus and climate change VII

Alternatives to 'Creation': a brief tangent
For those interested in philosophy and worldviews, a Christian understanding of creation can be usefully contrasted with at least three other commonly held views: materialism, pantheism, and deism. I realise each of the following descriptions are rough sketches requiring much more detail to be useful engagements with alternative understandings, but I offer them briefly to help delineate a conception of the world as 'creation'.

• Materialism is the view that only what is tangible is real, that we ought not to be distracted by dreams of an otherworldly beyond and instead focus on what’s in front of our eyes, what can be grasped and manipulated. There’s something very helpfully pragmatic about this approach. I’ve already claimed that matter matters, that our responsibilities lie here and now with the good we can actually do. Yet the atheism implicit in this claim renders empty or at best a useful lie our earlier discussion of existence as gift.

• Pantheism, or everything-is-god-ism, treats the cosmos as itself divine. Thus, you and I and the trees and the stars are all fragments of God. Once again, there’s something in this view that resonates deeply with our experience and with the Scriptures. The world is filled with wonder. If we start to pay attention, it is filled with jaw-dropping marvels in which we can catch glimpses of divine glory. But according to Jesus, only if we treat it as a secondary good can we enjoy it properly. Once we start treating anything good as God, then we not only ignore and dishonour God who gave us the good thing, but we also start to distort the gift he gave.

• Deism is the idea that God may have made the world, but he is like a clockmaker, who sets the clock ticking and then walks away and perhaps just watches from a distance. This view highlights the regularity, predictability and complexity of the systems we inhabit, as well as our responsibility to live well within them. But in the Scriptures, we find a God who not only made the cosmos but who continues to take responsibility for it, who continues to be intimately involved.
Twelve points for correctly naming the city.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; IX(b); X; XI; XII; XIII; XIV; XV.