I have attended this lecture on the financial tsunami in January.
Apart from explaining the current situation from an economist's point of view, Paul Williams also quoted Leslie Newbigin:
"Just as a society believes in the future saves in the present in order to invest in the future, so a society without that belief spends everything now and piles up debts for future generations to settle."
He suggested solutions for the current situation from a Christian point of view might be:
**Practise Jubilee and Sabbath
Jubilee -deliverance, liberty, restoration of debt, forgiveness
Sabbath -discipline on addiction, consumption pattern, focus on God
Enjoy what's been given to us
He mentioned that the church's disapproval of debt in history until the Reformation (because of trade), and we may need to recover our disapproval.
Romans 13:8
"Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. "
He used the example of the YMCA hotel where he stayed in this trip, (the one just next to the Peninsula, with similar views). YMCA, being a Christian organisation has different vision. It's not that Christians cannot make a profit, but they do not try to maximize profit. With that view, they can probably charge a lot more for the rooms, but they do not. Doing things in a God honoring way doesn't necessarily mean losing money.
There was a question from the audience about investments Christians should make. He said we can't change the world but can work to change it. We can choose equity instead of debt, investments with relational elements: sharing risks with someone we know. (In the Old Testament, they could charge interest from foreigners, because they were not in relation with them, so it didn't matter.)
What can we do now? What should we do now? Not in the sense of how to regain what we have lost, but what we, as Christians, can do to change the world, now that we realise the old ways didn't work all that well.
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