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Counter-Memorandum to Christians, Christian congregations and regional churches
CALL to Christians, Christian congregations and regional churches
Counter-Memorandum to Christians, Christian congregations and regional churches to reject the memorandum on entrepreneurial action of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) on biblical, theological and economic grounds
2008 OCTOBER 31
Note: An abridged version of this counter-memorandum, originally published in German in Freitag 46, 13.11.2008, is available at http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/11/382976.shtml.
In July 2008, the Council of the EKD published a memorandum on “entrepreneurial action from a Protestant perspective” (“Unternehmerisches Handeln in evangelischer Perspektive”). Those signing this call have carefully studied the document and published their critical assessment in the book “Peace with Capital? We say No to the accommodation of the Protestant Church to the power of business” (translation of German name). In spite of different approaches the authors came to the common conclusion that, with this pronouncement, the EKD, has taken the wrong course from a biblical, theological, economic and ecumenical perspective.
- The EKD depicts present reality in a euphemistic way, thus drawing a line between itself and the majority of the world’s population—including the losers in Germany. They increasingly suffer from the divisive, impoverishing and ecologically destructive consequences of the dominating system.
- By calling this reality “social market economy” instead of its proper name, which is “neo-liberal capitalism”, the EKD legitimates this system—at a time when the majority of humanity and more and more states are turning away from neo-liberalism. It gives the impression that the disastrous situation for people and the earth to be observed at present is caused by nothing but individual misbehaviour, thus white-washing the system.
- The EKD distances itself from its traditional social ethical insights that acting in business has to be embedded in society by social and ecological policies (cf. the Joint Statement of the Churches on the Social and Economic Development in Germany, 1997, “For a Future Founded on Solidarity and Justice”, para. 22ff., in English on EKD website). In opposition to this insight it accepts, in line with the neo-liberal mainstream, that “regulation by the state has to be limited to what is most necessary” (Memorandum, para. 44)
- Those responsible for this pronouncement and its distribution endanger the unity of the EKD with the worldwide community of churches organized in the framework of the World Council of Churches (WCC), the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). After all, these church groups have, in a long, biblically based process, clearly taken sides for that part of the world’s population that is excluded and impoverished by the dominant system, and for the earth and the threat to its sustainability. That means rejecting neo-liberal capitalism.
We call upon all Christians (especially the members of synods at all levels), congregations and regional church bodies to challenge those responsible in the EKD on a biblical basis and with clear arguments. Urge them to withdraw the memorandum, to stop the accommodation to the dominant economic and political powers, to take seriously their own social-ethical traditions and develop them in the light of the disastrous effects of economic globalization and return to the worldwide ecumenical community of churches.
Here is a short summary of our arguments, which we developed in the above mentioned book.
I. The situation and its interpretation
Since the 1980s we have witnessed the gradual dismantling of the achievements of the workers’ movements in the form of the social taming of liberal capitalism (in Germany called the “social market economy”). This onslaught against the social functions of the state was prepared for in dictatorships set up by the West like that in Chile and made possible by the global deregulation and liberalisation of capital, which was consequently in a position to play national governments and workforces off against each other. This development was politically sought and organised by the USA, Europe and Japan, the countries in which the hundred largest transnational companies have their headquarters. The dramatic consequences of this development are the constant systemic broadening of the gulf between rich and poor, exclusion and impoverishment of broad strata of the population and reinforced ecological destruction in the North and South. In short, the whole of life on this earth is being subordinated to the goal of capital accumulation.
Accordingly, the great majority of people and increasingly also governments as in Latin America reject this development towards neoliberalism. The EU, by contrast, wanted to finally legalise this in the European constitution and now seeks to do the same in the treaty of Lisbon. Wherever these projects were presented to populations for approval they said no to the neoliberalisation and militarisation of the EU—which did not prevent the dominant elites from pushing the project through against the wish of the majority of the EU populations. In Germany almost 70% of people state that things are unjust in Germany whereas only 30% of politicians have the same perception. That shows how distant politics is from the experience of the majority of citizens in the country.
By contrast, worldwide social movements are arising, in order to resist neoliberalism and seek alternatives. The same thing applies to the ecumenical movement. All assemblies in the above-mentioned church families have taken clear decisions in this direction—with the (admittedly generally hesitant) participation of delegates from the EKD as well. And now the people responsible in the EKD are preparing to defer to the most powerful class of the dominant system without even mentioning the ecumenical decisions. To avoid misunderstandings: with our critical analyses we do not want to say anything about individual entrepreneurs. Some of them appreciate the problems we are referring to, but in view of the politically created systemic constraints they howl with the wolves. Many small and medium-sized businesses even number among the victims of these trends.
Calling the predominant system a social market economy is misleading. The programmatic interventionism of its chief author in the 1950s, Alfred Müller-Armack, is inadmissibly simplified if social balance is merely understood as the redistribution of the results of uninfluenced market processes. His idea was, after all, to make “social justice … an integral part of our economic order” not only a social order alongside the economic order, which would then be de facto placed after the functional conditions of untrammelled market processes. This is the conversion of the “classical” social market economy by the “Initiative for a new social market economy”—to misuse the good name—which is being financed in the neoliberal spirit by the employers associations of the metal and electro industry and propagated by the Bertelsmann Foundation.
With this change of tack, those responsible in the EKD have turned away from the tradition precisely of German Social Protestantism. This had helped to influence a development initiated by the workers’ movement to tame capitalism through state regulation and deliberate programmatic interventions. Right after the founding congress of the Protestant-social congress in 1890, the economist Adolf Wagner described the task of the state in a way that is extremely topical in an age of neoliberalism. He asked: “Where, how and when must state power intervene in industry?” Then he conceded: “We made the terrible mistake of thinking that the perfect freedom of economic movements would bring salvation, while we must restrict economic selfishness with the firmest possible standards of law and ethics.” The basic idea of social reform through the creative activity of the state from ethical conviction has been the decisive socio-political contribution of Protestantism since the beginnings of the welfare state in the times of Bismarck. The consequences of the marriage between throne and altar were certainly most problematic in terms of state policy and democratic theory, but very fruitful in terms of social policy. This is because the state was seen as a social welfare state, not just as an instrument of power or based on the rule of law. In the memorandum “Just Participation” (2006) the EKD refers to the Scandinavian states and the formative forces there exhibit precisely the Lutheran understanding of the state. Yet there is no question of that in the EKD memorandum on entrepreneurial action. The decisive point for the social ethical tradition of German Social Protestantism is not to expect an improved capitalism from the sum of individual “honest merchants”, but precisely to expect it from an operational and active state, which limits the freedom to act of entrepreneurs. The fact that an individual entrepreneur needs to minimise their costs lies in the logic of the system and they cannot be individually blamed for this. So that this logic does not become destructive, however, it must be restricted by law. It is not micro-economic logic of individual companies that takes priority but rather a pre-eminent social policy (Wilhelm Röpke). The responsibility of policymakers for a “deliberately socially regulated market economy” (para. 143, For a Future Founded on Solidarity and Justice, 1997) takes priority. Only after that is a morally aware “honest merchant” called upon to show responsibility. The memorandum reverses this order and weighting, however.
The error of the EKD memorandum is precisely due to the fact that it personalises the systemic problems. An important original line of the idea of responsibility leads us to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who thought about church responsibility afresh from his own experience of resistance and in a way that was decisive for Protestantism. Responsibility involves, “getting the driver out of his seat if he is drunk and drives into the crowd”. This needs to be spelled out again today in terms of the more and more totalitarian economy and the role of the state. Anyone who, like the memorandum, banks only on “the ethical awareness, clear orientation and commands, not to speak of spiritual home” (introduction to para. 125) of entrepreneurs in order to prevent inhuman developments does without the shaping of conditions and allows the crises to get worse. The fact that the Protestant Church sinks to that is not just an offence—it is a theological scandal. It thereby makes itself compatible with a neoliberal understanding of the state and the economy that only operates with the concept of individual responsibility and thus promptly falls into the neoliberal trap.
Isn’t it an irony of history that the memorandum should have appeared when it did—precisely at the same time as the house of cards of casino capitalism would have collapsed if the states had not stepped in? But they intervene in order to balance out the losses of speculative capital with tax money, now that the profits have been privatised—not in order to regulate the economy along social and ecological lines. We here see again what a powerful cartel politics and capital form in the present system. When the memorandum speaks of power it is played down. It reminds us that the “entrepreneurs have a special responsibility” (introduction to para. 50). Yet power is not limited by reprimand but through law and counter-power, particularly from works’ councils and trade unions. Hence it is a conceptual defect not to mention other persons and institutions involved in the process of doing business.
The picture propagated by the memorandum of a God-fearing entrepreneurial class leaves no room for everyday business life. If the social, ecological and economic reality is mentioned in its disastrous shape this is in the euphemistic guise of the regrettable individual case or the unsystemic faux pas. The memorandum draws a superficial and crudely idealistic picture of entrepreneurial action and is most careful to keep silent on the motives, constraints and interests determining the capitalist economy. Only once does it make the statement of principle that modern business is “fundamentally driven by personal interest and the self-maximisation of capital” (para. 128). But no analytic or theological consequences are drawn from this.
An economy driven by the race to make the maximum return is blind for the social, economic and societal consequences; indeed, while striving to cut costs structurally it tends to over-exploit social and natural resources. Prosperity, provision for the future, maintenance of life support systems only succeeds on the basis of legal bonds and controls and by withdrawing certain goods and services from the laws of the market. The idea that when competition functions “neither consumers nor workers are exploited and there is no discrimination, as anyone who practises discrimination will suffer a competitive disadvantage” (para. 44) is an idea belied by the facts of everyday life.
And yet Protestant social ethics and Catholic social doctrine have already posited the time-honoured criterion: labour before capital. Inferring economic processes from the working person would be an approach that can interpret the biblical option for the poor objectively in terms of economic ethics. Employment and its real situation is from the standpoint of the option for the poor, which the memorandum allegedly takes as its criterion, the critical and ethical standard for the normative judgement of economic systems. If the memorandum had had the courage to draw the conclusions of the social ethical criteria it formulated itself then it would not simply have become a legitimisation of the interests of a particular minority of employers and their view of things.
A further problem: the sum of micro-economic behaviour gives a macro-economic process that is not intended by the micro-economies. Indeed, one cannot draw an analogy of macro-economic action from micro-economic behaviour. That micro-economic fallacy has come into fashion again, where “right” management thinking and action is transferred to the macro-level and there becomes wrong. Through its occasionally almost servile ingratiating attitude towards the main addresses, the business practitioners, the memorandum reinforces their arrogance in thinking they can adequately understand economic connections from their micro-economic level and offer appropriate solutions to problems. Instead of correcting such wrong interpretations, which infer macro interpretations from the micro level, they are indirectly fawned upon.
The result: in view of the systemic and ideological preconditions of the predominant system, it is deceptive to argue with an individual ethical concept of responsibility of the entrepreneur. You cannot stop an intercontinental jet with a bicycle brake. To try to do so is to veil reality and contribute to continuing the socially and ecologically murderous system. And just this is what the EKD memorandum does. What is its theological basis?
II. Bible and theology – an ideological quarry?
For a church that calls itself “evangelical” (from the Latin evangelium: good news), the whole of Scripture is the theological yardstick of its words and deeds. The Reformation called that sola scriptura. Listening to God today is thus dependent on hearing the voice of God in scripture. This voice does not speak in general truths and ethical principles, but concretely in the respective social, economic and political conditions.
The core of the biblical message is the first commandment: “I am the NAME your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex 20:2). For an evangelical church the NAME, who identifies itself as the liberator from the house of slavery, is God alone, no one else. This God wanted a people in which no one was master and no one was a slave. “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you” (Lev 18,3). This difference between Israel and the nations is summed up in the Ten Words (“Ten Commandments”). Die Ten Words do not tell us how we must live but how we must not live. They leave us the freedom to solve our problems in the way that seems best to us on condition that Egyptian conditions never creep in, never conditions like in the house of slaves, never “Canaanite” conditions, conditions of large land ownership, where Baal, the “owner”, is god (1Kings 18:21; 21:1-16). The Ten Words may be summed up in two prohibitions following the first commandment: the ban on slavery (exploitation of people’s labour) and the ban on accumulation (piling up non-shared wealth).
This necessary difference between God’s people and current world orders and systems as a promise for people that they have alternatives to existing conditions, by no means only concerns the First Testament. The same may be said of the writings of the Messianic communities who followed Jesus. The real world order is the space in which the word is to be heard and thus it determines the way in which we have to speak but not the content of what we say (Jn 17, 11, 15-16). For John and the whole Jesus movement the Roman Empire was the world order. The community must be clear that it lives in the real world, but no less clear that it must not understand itself in terms of the (Roman) world order, and its alleged rules. World criticism is the essential task for a church that calls itself evangelical and seeks to follow in the footsteps of the prophets and apostles.
The Hellenist empires and the Roman Empire were an early form of globalisation. They meant the end of the autonomy of all local and regional economies, also of the Torah economy of the Jewish people. Jesus and his movement wanted a world in which the Torah could finally be lived out, in which no one is master and no one slave, neither in Israel nor among the nations (Gal 3:26-28). If we still use the word “Lord” it is only for Jesus the Messiah (Christ); if he is lord then no one else is more lord than he who did not come to “abolish [the law or the prophets] but to fulfil” (Mt 5,17), i.e. as hope for “all the nations” (Mt 25,31ff; 28,19f.). Thus the Evangelical Church holds firm to the promises for Israel, which, it hopes, are promises for all the nations. Going out to all nations with this message is the answer of the world church to globalisation, the Roman globalisation of those times, the neoliberal globalisation of today. If this world order of slavery through distress and poverty is Egypt, through the accumulation of wealth of this world in the hands of a few Canaans, then the Evangelical Church must depart from this Egypt and this Canaan, which means being diametrically opposed to them.
All this can be clearly perceived if we read the Bible without prejudice. After the period of modern, bourgeois individualisation and abstract talk, it is the contextual interpretation of the Biblical writings, which make it possible to hear the voice of God more precisely. We can thus recognise the relevance of the new economy that spread in the whole of the Ancient Near East in the 8th century BC. Based on property, interest and monetary mechanisms, it called forth sharp social divisions (on one side large-scale landownership, on the other debt, impoverishment, loss of land and debt bondage). The prophets from Amos on reacted sharply to these socio-economic ills (Amos 2:6-8; Isaiah 5:8). Micah e.g. criticised the fact that the rich people seize the land (Mi 2,1ff), while the city rulers give judgments for bribes, the priests give instructions for payment and the prophets prophesy for money (3,11).
The legal reforms of the Book of the Covenant (Ex 21-23), Deuteronomy and the holiness law (Leviticus) are just as clear. Deuteronomy is the one to read, above all. Here we find a large, connected and coordinated group of economic and social laws that develop into the first social network. The basic idea is that the wealth given by God with the exodus and gift of land shall be shared among all. Precisely to those who cannot participate in it immediately because they have no land of their own. This participation will lead to more blessing, with work being the particular activity of blessing (e.g. Dt 14:29; 15:10.18; 16:15). The holiness law states the theological reasons for rejecting the new economy in very precise terms: the land belongs to God, therefore there cannot be absolute ownership of the vital resources for people’s livelihoods (Ps 24:1). For that reason the lawgivers of Israel exempted houses and land, the basic resource of an agricultural society from the market mechanism: “land shall not be sold” (Lev 25:23). It is not the individual law that shows the way forward here but the meaning of the whole Torah is the society of liberated slaves. All of this remains valid in the Second Testament. In Deuteronomy 15:4 this means, in the context of the social laws: “There will, however, be no one in need among you.” The early church believed this: because no one sees anything as their absolute property there are no poor people among them. And thus they bear witness to the resurrection of Jesus for the life of all (Acts 4:32ff.).Scripture does not tell us how to achieve that in our completely different world. The fact that the structure of society must realise the autonomy (self chosen life for each person) and equality (truly equal access opportunities to all resources in society for all) with constructive criticism or through resistance and alternatives—this fact is an inviolable command for a church that seeks to call itself evangelical in its orientation to biblical traditions.
Through a contextual interpretation of the Biblical texts and the discovery of the historical connections we can lay the basis for the transfer to our day and age. The topicality of critical prophecy in liberation theology shows such a counter model. It thus becomes clear that according to the biblical witness, social and economic justice are not something additional to faith in God, but are expressed in precisely the question of whether we are dealing with the God of the Bible or an idol. Jesus thus confronts us with the question: God or Mammon, the biblical God of justice or the idol of accumulation of wealth (“laying up treasure”).
None of that is to be found in the EKD memorandum—neither methodologically nor substantively. Instead, individual New Testament texts are adjusted to its own ideological interests in order to provide assistance to the crisis-rocked neoliberal concept of society. Prophets and Torah are carefully avoided and the biblical message is thereby reduced. Principles are distilled from the Bible which are then used in keeping with the EKD’s own interests. The parable of the talents must stand up to the interpretation of reconciling biblical faith with Adam Smith’s liberal view of enlightened self-interest. And yet the authors overlooked the fact that Adam Smith had deleted all references to biblical tradition from the 3rd edition of his standard work on the “Theory of Moral Sentiments”, as he was convinced that there was an unbridgeable contradiction between the basic motives of the modern market economy and biblical Christian tradition. How far real existing market economy diverges from the lovely ideals is proven by the Third Report on Poverty and Wealth of the German Federal Government and is to be seen at every soup kitchen of the Protestant and Catholic welfare organisations (Diakonie and Caritas).
As in a textbook the memorandum writes against this reality: “In a regulatory framework which secures both sharp competition and social balance this striving for personal well-being can at the same time lead to affluence for all” (para. 43). The fact that this “invisible hand” is nothing but the deistic trust in one God, which even sums up the evil of greed to a good for all, would be worth analysing theologically. The economist Alexander Rüstow speaks of a non-Christian, “heathen, deistic theology”. The founder of the social market economy Alfred Müller-Armack agrees when he sees here “not academic insight but rock from religious strata”. Georg Wünsch, author of the first Germany Protestant economic ethic, is listed in the bibliography of the memorandum. He should have been quoted, however, since he calls the economic expectation of harmony from the invisible hand, “a most powerful faith”. The turns in the “invisible hand”, which allegedly creates harmony between the striving for personal advantage and the common good, is the ideological core of the religion of the marketplace. It is in direct contrast to the trust in the liberating God of the Bible. Yet the EKD memorandum disregards this economic and theological criticism—along with the social theological insights of Luther. The latter’s text “The freedom of a Christian” is not interpreted in the memorandum with the assistance of his writings on actual economic questions but likewise distilled into principles that are then used arbitrarily. Otherwise the authors would have had to contend with his vehement criticism of early capitalism: his defence of the biblical ban on interest, his challenging the political institutions to intervene in the marketplace, and his condemnation of the transnational trading and bank societies (he was primarily thinking of the Fuggers, a family company), which he called on people to boycott (“On trading and usury”, 1524):
“Of (banking and trading) companies I ought to say much, but that whole subject is such a bottomless abyss of avarice and wrong that there is nothing in it that can be discussed with a clear conscience. For what man is so stupid as to not to see that companies are nothing else than mere monopolies? Even the temporal law of the heathen forbids them as openly injurious, to say nothing of the divine law and Christian statutes. They have all commodities under their control and practice without concealment all the tricks that have been mentioned; they raise and lower prices as they please and oppress and ruin all the small merchants, just as though they were lords over God’s creatures and free from all the laws of faith and love... No one need ask, then, how he can belong to the companies with a good conscience. The only advice to give him is: let them alone, they will not change. If the companies are to stay, right and honesty must perish; if right and honesty are to stay, the companies must perish.”
III. Consequences for the EKD
The refusal of the memorandum to take note of the present dangerous reality and its causes, the resultant decreasing solidarity of the losers in the dominant system and the sidelining and reversal of the biblical, Reformation and present-day ecumenical message throws a worrying light on the state of the Evangelical Church in Germany. The words we hear from the mouth of its representatives show that they see their church as a market-compliant provider of religious services—not as an evangelical church, but as a liberal, cultural Protestant undertaking (see the discussion paper Church of Freedom of the EKD, 2006), even if it says in the memorandum on entrepreneurial activity: “the church is not a company” (lead-in to para. 115). The church is not, but the EKD is apparently developing in this direction.
The memorandum gives the impression that the Evangelical Church in Germany is increasingly led by motives that are foreign to the Gospel. It has already distanced itself from the Barmen Declaration. The memorandum says of Christian faith: “from it spirit there arises the decision for an economic order in the tradition of the social market economy” (p. 12, 2.). Hence it takes the “model of the social market economy” (para. 128), in a neoliberal interpretation, as orientation for the speaking and acting of the church besides the one Word of God. If the EKD follows this memorandum it will no longer “reject this false doctrine as though the church were permitted to hand over the form of its message or its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the ideological or political convictions of the day” (Barmen, article 3). In the light of this article, the memorandum represents views that are no longer compatible with the Barmen Declaration and which affect the substance of the church. By deliberately ignoring the fundamental questioning of the system started by the ecumenical movement and the biblical-theological criteria for judgment and action, and instead mooting a completely unrealistic image of the “honest merchant” and a simplified and partial understanding of an allegedly still leading “social market economy”, it legitimises de facto the predominant and now crisis-rocked neoliberalism. Now of all times, when the crises and the disaster of this neoliberal economic order are becoming ever more apparent and resistance is growing, the memorandum sets out to shore it up despite its dwindling legitimacy.
After all that the Evangelical Church went through in the 1930s we see ourselves urgently challenged to come back to the tradition of the theology of the Confessing Church and to launch and new confessing movement.
Just that has been done by the worldwide ecumenical community of churches in the context of the WWC, WARC and the LWF for over ten years—although the German churches have been hesitant in taking it up, if they have at all, and it has been notoriously repressed in the statements of the EKD. This confessing process (processus confessionis) has been expressed in a series of significant continental consultations, climaxing in the assemblies of the above-mentioned organisations and their resolutions.
The LWF assembly in Winnipeg in 2003 recommended to its member churches:
“As a communion, we must engage the false ideology of neoliberal economic globalization by confronting, converting and changing this reality and its effects. This false ideology is grounded on the assumption that the market, built on private property, unrestrained competition and the centrality of contracts, is the absolute law governing human life, society and the natural environment. This is idolatry and leads to the systematic exclusion of those who own no property, the destruction of cultural diversity, the dismantling of fragile democracies and the destruction of the earth..”
Appealing to the Theological Declaration of Barmen the 24th General Assembly of the WARC, meeting in Accra in 2004, stated:
“(18) We believe that God is sovereign over all creation. ‚The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof’ (Psalm 24.1). (19) Therefore, we reject the current world economic order imposed by global neoliberal capitalism... We reject any claim of economic, political, and military empire which subverts God’s sovereignty over life and acts contrary to God’s just rule.”
Now, the EKD itself is not a church in the strict sense. It is an association of member churches which have entrusted it certain tasks—including ecumenical representation in international church organisations. That automatically gives rise to the task of the member churches, but also of the members of the EKD synod, to confront the EKD with the question: do those responsible for the publications of the memorandum represent a teaching that is no longer compatible with the Bible and confessions? In any case, the EKD must stand up to intensive and public challenge by all responsible Christians. By keeping silence we would be bring guilt on the church of Jesus Christ. That does not mean that anyone takes it upon themselves to claim that others are not Christians or to exclude them. This is often asserted by those who do not want to face up to the question. In fact, the question about the limits to possible church fellowship must not be at the centre. According to Bonhoeffer’s fundamental work on the status confessionis and the question of church fellowship this is absolutely the wrong question. It is a matter of the synodal-conciliar, corporate confession of the church to God in Christ in the given situation. The worldwide ecumenical process is trying to invite its member churches to do just that—in view of the dominant system– and with this memorandum the EKD has withdrawn from just that.
Do not misunderstand our standpoint here: we are aware that everyone, including ourselves, is in some way or another tied up in the dominant system. That in itself characterises a totalitarian situation as in the Roman Empire and today, that itself, even if we see and want the good, we cannot do it (Rom 7). That is so today because literally the whole life world is subjected to the logic of capital accumulation. But precisely for that reason the church must unmask the logic of the system in its different social forms, reject it and at least start to overcome it with a clear direction in its own community, thereby becoming salt for another possible world. Of course we cannot present a proposal for how the necessary alternatives could replace the dominant system in a hurry; but we could and must seek ways in which the worst errors, imbalances and devastating social and ecological distortions that cause the system today, are contained, and at the same time help to develop long-term solutions. The churches must get involved in this quest—particularly in the organising of their own community life—instead of offering justifications for the dominant system. Will such a new community be formed, that lives in Christ through the Holy Spirit and thus consistently and variously serves life?
In order to contribute to this, we call upon all Christians—particularly the members of Synods at all levels—and also congregations and regional churches, to contest the memorandum on entrepreneurial action on the basis of biblical theology and clear arguments, to urge the EKD to end the adaptation to the dominant powers in business and politics, to remain true to its own social-ethical traditions and to return to the worldwide ecumenical community of churches with its insights and challenges. The test for the EKD could be to speak up for the unemployed and impoverished, the welfare benefit recipients and all victims and sufferers in our country too, instead of making peace with capital.
At the same time we have issued a call with the request for signatures to be presented to the EKD Council at Pentecost 2009.1
Ulrich Duchrow, Prof. Dr. theol.
Christian Felber, Mag. phil.
Kuno Füssel, Dr. theol.
Detlef Hensche, Dr. jur.
Siegfried Katterle, Prof. em. Dr. rer. pol.
Silke Niemeyer, Pfarrerin
Franz Segbers, Prof. Dr. theol.
Ton Veerkamp, Lic. theol.
Karl Georg Zinn, Prof. Dr. rer. pol.
1 The call is online from November 2008 to Pentecost 2009 at www.publik-forum.de and www.kairoseuropa.de.
Counter-Memorandum to Christians, Christian congregations and regional churches
CALL to Christians, Christian congregations and regional churches
CALL to Christians, Christian congregations and regional churches to reject the memorandum on entrepreneurial action of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) on biblical, theological and economic grounds
In July 2008, the Council of the EKD published a memorandum on “entrepreneurial action from a Protestant perspective” (“Unternehmerisches Handeln in evangelischer Perspektive”). Those signing this call have carefully studied the document and published their critical assessment in the book “Peace with Capital? We say No to the accommodation of the Protestant Church to the power of business” (translation of German name). In spite of different approaches the authors came to the common conclusion that, with this pronouncement, the EKD, from biblical, theological, economic and ecumenical perspective, has taken the wrong course.
- The EKD depicts present reality in a euphemistic way, thus drawing a line between itself and the majority of the world’s population—including the losers in Germany. They increasingly suffer from the divisive, impoverishing and ecologically destructive consequences of the dominating system.
- By calling this reality “social market economy” instead of its proper name, which is “neo-liberal capitalism”, the EKD legitimates this system—at a time when the majority of humanity and even more and more states are turning away from neo-liberalism. It gives the impression that the negative situation for people and earth we observe are caused by nothing but individual misbehaviour, thus white-washing the system.
- The EKD distances itself from its traditional social ethical insights that acting in business has to be embedded in society by social and ecological policies (cf. the Joint Statement of the Churches on the Social and Economic Development in Germany, 1997, “For a Future Founded on Solidarity and Justice”, para. 22ff., in English on EKD website). In opposition to this insight it accepts, in line with the neo-liberal mainstream, that “regulation by the state has to be limited to what is most necessary” (para. 44)
- Those responsible for this pronouncement and its distribution endanger the unity of the EKD with the worldwide community of churches organized in the framework of the World Council of Churches (WCC), the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). After all, these church groups have, in a long, biblically based process, clearly taken sides for that part of the world’s population that is excluded and impoverished by the dominating system, and for the earth and the threat to its sustainability. That means rejecting neo-liberal capitalism.
We call upon all Christians (especially the members of synods at all levels), congregations and regional church bodies to challenge those responsible in the EKD on a biblical basis and with clear arguments. Urge them to withdraw the pronouncement, to stop the accommodation to the dominant economic and political powers, to take seriously their own social-ethical traditions and develop them in the light of the disastrous effects of economic globalization and return to the worldwide ecumenical community of churches.
Heidelberg, Reformation Day, 31 October 2008
Signed by:
| Frank Crüsemann, Prof. Dr. theol. | Siegried Katterle, Prof. emer. Dr. rer. pol. |
| Ulrich Duchrow, Prof. Dr. theol. | Arne Manzeschke, PD Dr. theol. |
| Heino Falcke, D. Dr. theol. | Silke Niemeyer, Pastor |
| Christian Felber, Mag. phil. | Franz Segbers, Prof. Dr. theol. |
| Kuno Füssel, Dr. theol. | Ton Veerkamp, Lic. theol. |
| Detlef Hensche, Dr. jur. | Karl Georg Zinn, Prof. Dr. rer. pol, |
We ask you to sign this call (memorandumwts.uni-heidelberg.de).
We will present the signatures to the EKD Council at Pentecost 2009.
Related link:
- Holy Scripture is the Standard, not Capitalism – abridged version of this
counter-memorandum in English, originally published in German in
Freitag 46, 13.11.2008
Counter-Memorandum to Christians, Christian congregations and regional churches
CALL to Christians, Christian congregations and regional churches
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