Lewis Mudge,We Can Make the World Economy a Sustainable Global Home

Paul S. Chung, Church and Ethical Responsibility in the Midst of World Economy: Greed, Dominion, and Justice, James Clarke: Cambridge, 2014; 320 pp.: 9780227679999, £25.00 (pbk)

As Naomi Klein has reminded us (in This Changes Everything, 2014) the current economic model is what lies behind our failure to deal with climate change, and may bring the whole human project to destruction in very short order. Sharp theological challenges to this system have come from the World Council of Churches (WCC), and from Ulrich Duchrow and Franz Hinkelammert. These two books pick up these challenges in very different ways.

Lewis Mudge died in 2009 and this book brings together papers he was working on when he died. Essentially the essays continue the arguments of his last published work, arguing for covenantal humanism and a stakeholder economy in which all people would be included. Mudge was interested in interfaith dialogue, and hoped to see an interfaith response to the economic crisis. The book contains essays, broadly in response to his ideas, from a Jew and a Muslim, as well as a response from within the Christian community. The book shows the influence of liberation theology, especially as this shaped the thinking of the WCC. It is critical of Neo-Liberalism, though, Klein would say, not nearly critical enough. Despite the title, the need to respond to the climate crisis is not really at the centre of the arguments. The most important idea, in my view, is the notion of covenantal humanism. What Mudge would have made of the assaults on Gaza, or what is happening in Iraq and Syria I don’t know but it is tragic that when we need, as a global community, to be focusing on a response to climate change and a completely new model of economy, we are distracted by atavistic chauvinisms which appeal in one way or another to the Abrahamic faiths. Somehow or other human beings, and in particular religious communities, need to learn to talk to each other with respect, instead of bombing those with whom they disagree into oblivion, or looking to a seventh-century model of a religious state. Of course, those who do these things would have no interest in covenantal humanism, but that is all the more reason for those of us who do to go on working at these ideas.

Paul Chung’s book, dedicated to Ulrich Duchrow, does not offer us a theological engagement with economics in the way, say, that Douglas Meeks did or Duchrow does, but rather a history of the ideas which got us where we are, and an account of the discussion surrounding them. There are detailed discussions of thinkers from Locke to Habermas, of Marx to Wallerstein and Hardt and Negri. A final chapter sketches alternatives; an excursus considers the relationship of East Asian religions to social justice; and an epilogue sets out a theology of God’s life and emancipation from greed and dominion more or less in the way that Duchrow and Hinkelammert present it. Interesting as the account is I wish that the excursus occupied the main part of the book, because the history is available elsewhere and the theology is more interesting. It is long overdue for Minjung theology to move on and go deeper, and this is something Professor Chung could offer us. South Korea has both been through the capitalist ‘miracle’ and been dumped in the trash can as the wheel moves onwards and further east to China. Apart from the Philippines it has the largest Christian population in Asia. It is locked in another atavism in its relation to its paranoid northern sister, parotting slogans from an ideology which needs carbon dating. All this means that South Korea could and ought to be extraordinarily theologically creative. So far, to my knowledge, only Aloysius Pieris, in Sri Lanka, has really shown the kind of creativity which might flow from the encounter of Christianity with both Asian religion and the call for social justice which was embodied in the Marxist tradition which Professor Chung knows so well. What we really look for is not this book but a full-length version of the excursus which brings these things together and shows us what this part of the world may have to offer in responding to the dire predicament we find ourselves in, which will be, not covenantal humanism, but some other kind of humanism, of which Pieris is the precursor.