{"id":27292,"date":"2015-03-16T08:46:26","date_gmt":"2015-03-16T12:46:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=27292"},"modified":"2015-03-16T02:59:57","modified_gmt":"2015-03-16T06:59:57","slug":"how-i-learned-to-stop-clobber-texting-and-love-george-bailey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2015\/03\/16\/how-i-learned-to-stop-clobber-texting-and-love-george-bailey\/","title":{"rendered":"How I learned to stop clobber-texting and love George Bailey"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I was\u00a0offered an internship that started two months after my college graduation. It was a pretty cool gig \u2014 almost my idea of a dream job at the time, even if the official title was somewhat ridiculous: I would be the Social and Ethical Responsibility in Investments Associate for the American Baptist Home Mission Society.<\/p>\n

There were two parts to that job, and I was excited about both of them. The first part involved shareholder activism. Like most religious institutions, the Baptists had endowments and pension funds. Those funds were invested in the stock market. Being significant shareholders meant they had some influence \u2014 albeit limited \u2014 on the actions and policies of the companies in which they were invested. So one part of my job as an SER Associate would involve\u00a0trying to wield that influence to leverage greater social responsibility on the part of the companies in which the Baptists were invested.<\/p>\n

The other part of the job was simple Baileyism. The Baptists also maintained\u00a0a smaller\u00a0portfolio of what they called \u201calternative investments\u201d \u2014 funds that promised a more modest financial return, but a far greater social benefit. This money was invested in community banks, credit unions and community development loan funds \u2014 institutions like the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan from It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/em>. These \u201calternative investments\u201d weren\u2019t charity \u2014 they provided a safe and steady, if unspectacular, trickle of income for the Baptist pension fund. But while they helped to fund the Baptists\u2019 ministries, they also helped to create jobs and affordable housing for working people in communities all over the country.<\/p>\n

This internship meant I\u2019d get to do all of that as my job<\/em>. I thought that sounded\u00a0awesome.<\/p>\n

But there was also a problem \u2014 a big<\/em> problem. This was all usury. Taking this job would make me a usurer \u2014 a money-lender collecting interest. And I knew what the Bible had to say about usury and usurers.<\/p>\n

\"I\"<\/a>
Biblically speaking, this man is a sinner \u2014 an abominable usurer whose wonderful life is detestable to God Almighty.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I was genuinely torn and couldn\u2019t decide whether or not I could accept this internship, biblically<\/em>. Yes, that\u2019s how I was thinking about it, in exactly those terms. I was an idealistic young white evangelical Christian, so I tended to think about everything<\/em> in those terms. \u201cBiblical\u201d and \u201cbiblically\u201d were my favorite adjective and adverb.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, George Bailey seemed like a hero to me. What could be better than\u00a0helping to support families and communities just like he did in that classic Christmas movie? It seemed innocent enough \u2014 not just harmless, but helpful<\/em>. But that\u2019s not what the Bible said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat you are doing is not right,\u201d said the prophet Nehemiah. \u201cLet us stop charging interest!<\/span>\u00a0Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves and houses, and also the interest\u00a0you are charging them \u2014 one percent of the money, grain, new wine and olive oil.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s Nehemiah 5:9-11. Chapter and verse.<\/p>\n

These alternative investments with their modest interest rates might seem to me to be a\u00a0wise\u00a0way to help the working poor, but I also had heard hundreds of sermons reminding me that \u201cthe wisdom of this world is foolishness<\/span>\u00a0in God\u2019s sight.\u201d I\u2019d even preached a couple of sermons like that myself. I knew that \u201cthe foolishness\u00a0of God is wiser than human wisdom,\u201d and that it was always dangerous to think that we knew better than what we read in the inerrant Word of God.<\/span><\/p>\n

I had become something of a do-gooder activist sort in college. My nickname was \u201cLefty,\u201d and I\u2019d voted for Michael Dukakis<\/em>. But I was still, very much, an evangelical believer. I was immersed in the clobber-text hermeneutic of white evangelical Christianity, and it just was not possible for me to disregard all the many clobber-texts I had found condemning the sin of usury.<\/p>\n

So before I was able to accept that internship, I scheduled appointments with a bunch of professors \u2014 good evangelical people who taught at my good evangelical college. I asked them to help me sort this out. This job and the work it would let me do seemed like a Good Thing. But the Bible, over and over again, clearly said that such interest-bearing investment was a Bad Thing. It was forbidden. A sin. An \u201cabomination\u201d detestable in the sight of God.<\/p>\n

It was finals time and these professors were busy, but some very patient professors in the graduate program in economic development still took the time to sit down with an undergrad English major, even though I was asking some fundamentally naive questions that amounted, more or less, to an accusation that their entire profession was an unbiblical affront to God. I came to them with a list of texts that seemed to me to be insurmountable, and I was expecting a conversation that would be focused on those texts, but that wasn\u2019t how those conversations went.<\/p>\n

Instead, with great patience, they talked with me about the difference between our modern context and the ancient context of those formidable biblical texts prohibiting usury. They talked about the underlying ethical principles at work in those texts \u2014 prohibiting the exploitation of the poor, and what that principle should mean today, in our context. It would be unjust, they said, to apply a rule meant to prohibit the exploitation of the poor in such a way that it resulted in harming the very people the rule was originally meant to protect. An absolute prohibition against all lending for interest would deny the poor the access to credit\u00a0that the enables the non-poor to thrive. In our context, today, it\u2019s that denial of access to credit from legitimate sources that often forces the poor to turn to predatory usurers. Shut down the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan and everyone will be forced to crawl to Old Man Potter.<\/p>\n

This was, for me, the beginning of a hermeneutic epiphany. It was my first serious encounter with another way of reading the Bible beyond the clobber-text hermeneutic that had been ingrained in me my whole life. And it was liberating \u2014 a first taste of the notion that this vast agglomeration of \u201cbiblical\u201d rules I\u2019d been carrying around as an endless list weren\u2019t the main point. Despite all the many times I\u2019d read those words from Jesus and from Paul, this was one of the first times it really sunk in for me that \u201cLove is the fulfillment of the law.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to be able to tell you that this was a transforming epiphany for me \u2014 that from then on I abandoned my prior clobber-texting mentality and embraced a deeper, better, more mature approach to reading the Bible. But, alas, this was only a first step in a long process. Yet it was enough to convince me to take that internship, which really did turn out to be a dream job.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These Bailey-ite “alternative investments” with their modest interest rates might seem to me to be a wise way to help the working poor, but I also had heard hundreds of sermons reminding me that “the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God\u2019s sight.” I knew that “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom,” and that it was always dangerous to think that we knew better than what we read in the inerrant Word of God.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[11,154,43],"class_list":["post-27292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evangelicals","tag-bible","tag-clobber-texting","tag-usury"],"yoast_head":"\nHow I learned to stop clobber-texting and love George Bailey<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"These Bailey-ite "alternative investments" with their modest interest rates might seem to me to be a wise way to help the working poor, but I also had heard hundreds of sermons reminding me that "the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God\u2019s sight." 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}