We Are Still Choosing the Wrong Tree

by Fr Joseph Falkiner OP · July 19, 2022

A reflection by Fr Joseph Falkiner OP –

But the Bible shows how we can enter the Garden of Eden once again

Original sin is a Church doctrine which proclaims that our human nature is somehow tainted, that we have a tendency to misuse the free will that God has given us. It is exemplified in the book of Genesis by a sort of parable where the main characters are the first two human beings to exist, Adam and Eve. They are given the ability by God to choose between two trees in the centre of the Garden of Eden — and they choose to eat the fruit of the wrong tree. It is a story with a moral.

They could choose to listen to God or to listen only to themselves. We know how they chose and the consequences. The world became a place full of wars, greed, destruction of the earth, selfishness, abuse of women and children, and other forms of sin. To this day we are not born into the Garden of Eden. We are living in a world governed by that original sin. The Bible is the story of how, if we listen to God, we can enter the garden once again.

Richard D Crane, a US theology professor, suggests that the ideology of the economic free market illustrates how people today are still choosing the wrong tree. Proponents of the free market believe that we should take economic decisions of our own choice and that economic theory should ignore God’s revelation. For them, original sin either does not exist, or if it does exist, they do not believe it applies to them.

The doctrine of original sin was established by the Church in the 5th century after an acrimonious ongoing debate between St Augustine and an English monk named Pelagius. Eventually, Pelagius was excommunicated and his teaching was declared heretical. To this day students for the priesthood are warned about Pelagianism, the denial of original sin.

It is to this heretical Pelagianism that Prof Crane is referring when he analyses what is being promoted by fundamentalist advocates of the free market. His 2019 article, which is available on the Internet, is entitled “Enslaved imaginations: The [Pelagian] heresy of market fundamentalism and Christian moral discernment”. It is well worth reading. “Market fundamentalism’s most insidious function is to prohibit moral evaluation of market outcomes on the grounds that free markets are fair,” he writes. “Christians bear a responsibility to expose the ‘heresy’ of market fundamentalism as a ‘deceptive rhetoric’ and to evaluate market outcomes in light of Jesus’ premium upon human well-being.”

Jesus vs the powers

Prof Crane notes that in all four Gospels, “Jesus is actively concerned about healing and deliverance for the poor and destitute and those on the margins of society. Jesus was constantly engaged in aggressive conflict with the political and economic powers that were destroying the lives and livelihoods of the people of his day. Burdensome Roman taxation, combined with predatory lending by the economic elite — the owners of the great estates — meant small landowners were losing their ancestral lands and being plunged into poverty and often debt slavery.

“Part of Jesus’ resistance to these oppressive powers was his active defiance of a distorted interpretation of the law of Moses that functioned to justify these gross disparities between the wealthy few and the impoverished many. By emphasising meticulous forms of ritual purity and de-emphasising those parts of the law that called Israelites to take care of the economically vulnerable and forgive the debts of the poor, the wealthy found a way to interpret their wealth as God’s blessing for their scrupulous attention to the details of ritual purity. The sufferings of the poor were interpreted as divine punishment for their inability to keep up with the burdensome proliferation of purity regulations,” Prof Crane explains.

He continues: “Through his healings, public fellowship meals with persons castigated as unclean and sinners, healings on the Sabbath day, and parables such as the story of the Rich Man who ends up in Hades and impoverished Lazarus who winds up in paradise (Luke 16:19–31),

Jesus was a scathing critic of a false and deceptive religious ideology that justified predatory economic behaviour.”

Can we tell those who choose the free market over the poor that they are choosing the wrong tree? In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus destroys the fig tree, which is a symbol for the temple in Jerusalem. That was presented in connection with the casting out of traders from the temple. They were not producing the kind of fruit that God wants.

Are we producing the right fruit from the right tree? Are we making the right choices?

Fr Joseph Falkiner is a Dominican in KwaZulu-Natal.

This article was published in the June 2022 issue of The Southern Cross magazine