On Earth as It Is in Heaven: A Faith-Based Toolkit for Economic Justice

by Eric Atcheson

I do believe in each generation rising to meet the challenges unique to its particular epoch of time.

Ecology concerns the very fabric of life, and because God is the author of life, these challenges are inherently theological.

If state budgets are reflections of our society’s choices and values, then we are not properly valuing our children or their teachers.

I heard a laundry list of reasons for not ministering with thoughtfulness and compassion to those experiencing homelessness—drugs, irresponsible life choices, an unwillingness to help themselves—that felt devoid of empathy.

Part of the rationalizing rhetoric used to dismantle domestic food aid programs like SNAP and TANF is to say that churches, not the government, should be the safety net. I want to disabuse us of that notion right away.

None of this should be construed as absolving the church of its biblical and historical mandate to feed and care for the poor. But in an era when the churches that are suffering the most tend not to be the megachurches of the televangelists we love to hate on, but rather the neighborhood church down the street from you that has been quietly providing for your impoverished neighbors for years and decades, “Let the churches do it” cannot be seen as a viable solitary option.

For a church that worships a Messiah who offered free healthcare as part of his ministry, alarms should be raised.

Even then, our task is not yet done: we must use our theological vocabularies to replace a healthcare framework of wealth-worship and profit generation with a Gospel message that has not been sanded away by the twin American idols of extreme individualism and unfettered plutocracy.

weigh the costs of your comfort versus the benefits of our collective salvation,

That concentrating wealth and land in the hands of too few people is inherently destabilizing was evident to the composers and compilers of the Tanakh, but is too often disregarded by people of faith in the twenty-first-century United States.

The Year of Jubilee was designed not so one isolated generation, but so that all generations, would experience liberation from the bondage of financial insecurity.

for each of us who have profited off of the exploitation of the poor.

More broadly, Christian readers should note God’s passion for social justice across the Tanakh. For Ezekiel, unjust actions contribute mightily to the sinfulness of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Foreigners and immigrants are specifically protected against being cheated or exploited; they are afforded the same treatment as an Israelite citizen.

Malachi said those who commit systemic economic sins—cheating of workers, oppressing the vulnerable—were in the same category as those who commit personal sexual sins like adultery. While the church has traditionally spoken out vociferously on the latter, our condemnation of the former has been much less consistent.