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A fan of Edmund Burke and the British Enlightenment, Easterly opts for a bottom-up, discover-what-works, and learn-your-way-into-the-future approach that assumes that incremental discovery is a better fit in a complex, dynamical world about which we can never know enough.
Collier identifies four poverty traps: experiencing chronic conflict, suffering the negative impact of natural resources (the resource curse), being landlocked with bad neighbors, and bad governance (2007, 56).
The third group of villages was also visited by the monthly health fair, but in addition, the mothers were given a kilo of dal (beans) and a set of metal dishes when their children completed their immunization series. Based on empirical results, the third option proved the most effective. This is an example of learning the way into the future—something we will turn to in Chapters 8 and 9—and echoes Easterly's concern for the importance of evidenced-based monitoring and evaluation.
De Soto's research demolished the prejudice that the poor are lazy and stupid.
de Soto showed that the informal businesses of the poor cannot grow in the informal sector and are vulnerable to theft, extortion, and natural disaster (1989, xix).
De Soto documented the raft of rules, fees, and procedures created by government regulation that make the legal registration of a local market or vendor's license a time-consuming and costly nightmare. These convoluted processes can involve more than fifty different steps, dozens of different government ministries and departments, and two to four years' worth of income to complete (1989, 131-32). The purpose of these regulations is to protect vested economic interests from competition.
The emergence of a system of property rights in the West provided this kind of proof to a lender, and so property became capital that could be leveraged. A system of property rights and the legal means to enforce them are largely missing in many parts of the world where the poor live. Systems of communal ownership, government ownership, or conflicting or undocumented ownership make for what de Soto calls dead capital, because no one will loan money on something a person cannot prove he or she owns (De Soto 2000).
One of the key contributions Yunus made to thinking about development was his idea that simply transferring money from the non-poor to the poor through a non-profit charitable arrangement might not always be the best thing to do. It has two weaknesses. First, this approach tends to create dependency and has not always helped the poor find a sustainable role in the local economy. Second, the scale and sustainability of such an approach are limited by how much the non-poor would give and how long they would give.
The good news is that the percentage of people living on less than US$2 a day has dropped from over 95 percent in 1820 to about 43 percent in 2008 (World Bank 2008).
Although the development proposals of Sachs, Easterly, Collier, de Soto, and Yunus have led us beyond simple models of economic growth and the historical tendency to have negative views of the poor and their potential, all of these contributors and their varied approaches share a common perspective: the modern worldview. All are materialistic, often technocratic, and reflect a firm belief in human reason, technology, and money as the keys to solving the problem of poverty. Their biggest common gap lies in the absence of religion and things spiritual in their explanation for why people are poor
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This chapter summarizes the history of American evangelical thinking on poverty and development.
This book is written from an evangelical perspective, with the word evangelical understood as affirming the uniqueness of Christ, the need for personal conversion, the importance of Bible as a guide to life, and a commitment to doing mission in the world.
In the 1920s American evangelicals took a holiday from history when it came to the thinking and doing of social action. Deeply wounded by the modernist-fundamentalist controversy, our conservative forbearers retreated behind the fundamentals of the faith and the singular importance of evangelism and stayed in a defensive posture for almost fifty years.
Evidence?
In the LCMS this was a time of orphanages. This is also a time of survival because of the Depression and the Second World War
Modernity, and particularly the fruits of the French Revolution, had led to a faith in the supremacy of human reason, and the resulting critical philosophies were pushing religion off the public stage. The effectiveness of science and technology was having the same effect. The materialistic and critical voices of Marx, Darwin, and Freud made religion seem less and less important. Modernity was in full bloom, and religion had been relegated to the spiritual realm and was expected to eventually go away altogether.
Capitalism today asks for faith in a god called “the hidden hand” and seems to have forgotten the goal of the original story. Adam Smith, capitalism's original storyteller, “wrote that the ultimate goal of business is not to make a profit. Profit is just the means. The goal is general welfare”
Human beings are to be God's co-creators in the world—with a very large assignment. In creation we are to use our God-given power to observe, reason, and then act on that new knowledge. Remembering that we are not God, and so cannot create out of nothing, we are empowered by God to create out of everything that God created in nature as long as we remember that the purpose of our creating is to enable the well-being of all human beings and natural world.
In Populorum progressio Paul VI concluded that being made in the image of God, and having been given gifts by God to contribute to the well-being of creation, implies that “every human life is called to some task by God….
Expectation of growth: “Be fruitful and increase” applies to the number of human beings and to the means of supporting them. God has provided abundantly in creation so that this can be done, and God has given humankind the ingenuity and adaptability necessary to create this necessary increase. This should give us pause when we too quickly and uncritically blame poverty on population growth. New babies are not simply empty stomachs or economic sink holes. They are also creative human minds and spirits, endowed with creative and productive potential. They, too, can be fruitful (Cromartie 1995,
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It led to widespread deception, distortion, and domination in all forms of human relationships—with God, within one's self (and family), within the community and between others, and with the environment. Figure 3-2: Impact of sin on all relationships.
We cannot read Satan out of the story and have it make any sense.
The direct consequences of the fall in terms of poverty and development are fairly obvious. A fruitful creation meant to sustain life does so reluctantly (Gn 3:17), and making the creation productive enough to sustain life now means struggle and hard work (Gn 3:19). Human life now has an end (Gn 3:19). The relationship between men and women became distorted and unequal (Gn 3:16). Violence and murder entered the human story (Gn 4:8), and the hunger for revenge entered the human heart (Gn 4:23). Complete human well-being is now a struggle and beyond the reach of human agency alone.
Human beings have made the world a better, safer, less threatening place to live, and abject poverty has been in decline since the beginning of the 1800s. Yet this improving world is still the site of genocides, wars, unjust social structures, greed, consumerism, and a host of other reminders that sin is alive as well.
Distorted by the fall, people occupying positions of power or influence within the economic system yield to the temptation to act more often as owners and less as stewards. They skew the system to enhance and protect their own self-interest and insulate themselves from the impact of these distortions on the less fortunate.
Finally, the religious system, which was created by God to bring the nations and their institutions into relationship with God and to make them aware of God's will and commands, too often colludes with the fallen political and economic systems. The prophets of accountability are gradually seduced by money, power, and prestige, gradually becoming silent (Ezek 22:28).
Park argues that focusing only on sin, as has been the preoccupation of Western theology, makes the impact of social or structural sin invisible. To rectify this, Park has proposed a theology of the wounded (2004).
Park reminds us that Jesus came both to die for sinners and to care for and liberate the oppressed—the sinned against (Luke 4:18-19).
Economically, the Exodus story is about moving from oppression in someone else's land to freedom and a productive life in their own land, a land fairly distributed to all so that everyone could enjoy the fruit of his or her own labor. Psychologically, the Exodus story is about Israel losing its self-understanding as a slave people and discovering the new understanding that, with God's help, they could be a people and become a nation.
The author does not consider The Prophet Of Deuteronomy 18 to be the Messiah. How could he miss that Moses said He would be greater. Non of Israel’s prophets were greater than Moses.
By struggling with the temptations and deceptions of the Evil one, the one who is against life and against God, Christ determined that he was called to be the Son of God and the Suffering Servant, both at the same time.
He knew this from the beginning. I must be about My Father’s business.
Where is the periphery today, and what does it mean to say that Jesus can make it the center of power?
At the synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus said that the Holy Spirit had anointed him “to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor” (Lk 4:18-19). Jesus' mission is a holistic mission to the poor.
What about: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. And, Go preaching repentance and the remissions n of sins?
When asked what must be done to inherit eternal life, Jesus said that the greatest commandment was a twin affirmation: “Love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself' (Mt 23:36). This is a commandment about relationships, not law and transgressions; about whom we must love, not simply what we must believe or do.
This is nuts. It’s everything. How can you love God without believing His teaching?
This must shape our view of poverty. Poverty is about relationships that don't work, that isolate, that abandon or devalue. Transformation must be about restoring relationships, just and right relationships with God, with self, with community, with the “other,” and with the environment.
The cross clarified something else. on the cross, in addition to canceling our sin, Paul tells us that Christ disarmed the powers and authorities, making a public spectacle of them (Col 2:20). In Christ, we no longer have to accept the rule of oppressive structures or of deceiving and dominating social systems.
Transformational development that does not declare the good news of the possibility of both personal and corporate liberation and redirection toward God is a truncated gospel, unworthy of the biblical text.
Christ is risen This is the transformation that begets all other transformations.
For too long evangelicals have treated the Bible as a book for the spiritual world and have failed to give it the freedom to inform the material world of everyday life and everyday “non-spiritual” decisions (see Figure 1-2). One of the challenges of Christian holism in development will be to release the Bible and the biblical narrative to speak to all phases of the process of human transformation. One of the best gifts that we have for the poor and the non-poor is the living word of God. We need to share it with them and let the living word speak for itself. More about this in the chapter on
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From the day our first parents walked out of the garden, estranged from God, each other, and the earth itself, God has been at work redeeming and reconciling the fallen creation, its people, and its social systems.
There is no transformational development apart from people who themselves are being transformed and who live in the community that is the home of their transformation.
If there is to be any human transformation that is sustainable, it will be because of the action of the Holy Spirit, not the effectiveness of our development technology or the cleverness of our participatory processes (see Chapter 6).
The chief actor in the historic mission of the Christian church is the Holy Spirit. He is the director of the whole enterprise.
We are to see the world as created, fallen, and being redeemed, all at the same time.
God at one and the same time upholds a given political or economic system, since some such system is required to support human life; condemns that system insofar as it is destructive to full human actualization; and presses for its transformation into a more human order. Conservatives stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers the third. The Christian is expected to hold together all three. (1992, 67)
There are five theological ideas that seem useful for Christians working for transformational development: creation, incarnation, redemption, kingdom of God, and power.
Between 1920 and the 1980s, evangelicals could not talk about the kingdom of God as it was a theme associated with “being liberal” and the ecumenical movement, and it was thus an object of some suspicion.
E. Stanley Jones, long-time missionary to India, makes an important contribution to kingdom theology when he presents the biblical metaphors of the “unshakable kingdom” and the “unchanging person” (Jones 1972).
Diamond has concluded that “history followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves” (ibid., 25).
This
Weak and meek social power, a coming upside-down kingdom that is not yet here, a triumphal resurrection that is preceded by torture and death on a cross—this is a hard road, and we need not only think about this theologically but also determine if we have the courage to live it. I am still on the fence.
First and foremost, in an intimate and serving relationship with God, through Jesus Christ. Second, in healthy, righteous, and just relationships with ourselves and our communities. Third, in loving, respectful, “neighboring” relationships with all who are “other” to us. Finally, in an earth-keeping, making-fruitful relationship with the earth.
