Materiality as Resistance

Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World

Walter Brueggemann

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781611649888
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is materiality?

Jesus practiced materiality when he healed the bodies of the sick, proclaimed Jubilee to the poor, and fed the five thousand. He practiced materiality over materialism. In Materiality as Resistance, Walter Brueggemann defines materiality as the use of the material aspects of the Christian faith, as opposed to materialism, which places possessions and physical comfort over spiritual values. In this concise volume, Brueggemann lays out how we as Christians may reengage our materiality for the common good. How does materiality inform our faith when it comes to food, money, the body, time, and place? How does it force us to act? Likewise, how is the church obligated to use its time, money, abundance of food, the care and use of our bodies, observance of Sabbath, and stewardship of our world and those with whom we share it? With a foreword from Jim Wallis, Materiality as Resistance serves as a manifesto of Walter Brueggemanns most important work and as an engaging call to action. It is suited for group or individual study.

Chapter 1

MONEY^*

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

—Matthew 6:19–21

AN OBVIOUS PLACE TO BEGIN CRITICAL REFLECTION ON THE materiality of our lives is with money. Money is a useful vehicle for the exchange of goods, a use that justifies market transactions. Money is, however, at the same time a powerful symbol (variously socially constructed) of influence, power, success, and virtue. It is to this latter function of money that material direction must attend, for in our society most of us are quite “innocent” about the spiritual propulsion of which money is capable.¹

A Christian critical understanding of money might begin with the dictum of John Wesley: Earn all you can; give all you can; save all you can. This dictum reflects a simple, responsible relationship to money. As we will see, however, this seemingly simple statement covers over a host of issues that will be usefully explored:

How much is enough to earn?

How little is enough to give?

How might one invest one’s savings?

An effective way into these questions is to begin as the Faith and Money Network (a satellite of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC) regularly began its seminars on money. The beginning point is to have participants in the seminar tell, in as much detail as possible, their personal story of money, how they experienced money in their early family life, how that family modeled money, and how the family earned, saved, and shared its money.

These matters are complicated for members of our society because a pervasive practice of consumerism, enabled by a theory of capitalist privatism, treats money as autonomous, as unrelated to the larger context of society. And when money is treated autonomously, all of the anchoring guidelines of Wesley are promptly nullified. The outcome of such an unanchoring is that money is valued instrumentally without reference to social context and without any awareness of either the gifts or the requirements of our social locations.

Consider first, earn all you can. Our capitalist society is vexed by the Protestant work ethic of Max Weber, whether or not there is in fact a connection to Calvin in our work ethic. There is no doubt that honest productive work is a virtue in our society, and it is rightly well paid . . . or should be. Thus the capacity to earn more by work is to be affirmed.

There are, however, a number of problems with Wesley’s simple formula:

How much is enough? Is “enough” less than “all you can”? In a time of mobile capital and the technological capacity to accumulate endlessly, “all you can” has no limit or restraint. Work may become a passion and an end in itself, so that accumulation of wealth becomes an addiction that expels the human dimensions of our lives. On the one hand, is payment for honest, productive work different from investment income, contradicting the old TV ad about “making money the old-fashioned way,” which meant managing one’s investments wisely? It is an illusion to think that investment income is “earned” or that it entails work. Roland Boer points out that in the ancient world those who lived on surplus wealth were in fact “nonproducers”:

The system of estates sought to deal with a very practical matter: how does one feed and clothe the nonproducers? Or rather, how does one enable the nonproducing ruling class to maintain the life to which its members had quickly become accustomed? Directly or indirectly (via tenure), managed estates were the answer.²

Of course it is not different in our world, in which the “nonproducing ruling class” depends on the (poorly paid) work of others. We are wont, in our society, to regard the indigent and unemployed as the “nonproducers” when in fact the “nonproducers” include those who rely on surplus wealth and investment income for which “earning” is a misguided misnomer.

On the other hand, what of those who lack earning power? The Protestant work ethic has pertained primarily to white males in our society as the ones who by work gained the virtue of wealth and success. But of course most such high earners, from the outset, had unacknowledged advantages.³ What of racial or ethnic minorities, women, the disabled, and especially those who carry the legacy of enslavement who never gain access to well-paid honest work? Our society has done almost nothing to guarantee or ensure just earning for so many. And for so many disinherited by our economy, their work is not adequately rewarded, so that honest work is not rightly well paid, rendering a viable life impossible. Conversely the well-connected high earners protect their edge through tax arrangements, legacy education, and other advantages that are denied those willfully left behind in our economy.

The work of mature materiality concerning “earn all you can” is to expose in critical ways the privatized, individualized notion of earning so that earners can begin to see themselves situated in a community of earners, some of whom enjoy huge advantage, some of whom are denied access, and all of whom are skewed by the pernicious norm of privatized wealth. When earning is set within community, earning power, its expectations, its promise, and its restraints may take on a very different texture.

Second, consider save all you can. Taken at its most simple, Wesley’s guideline means to gather, store, and keep all the money you can. Taken in such a way, the phrase amounts to a welcome barrier against the creedal urging of consumerism, “Spend all you can.” Thus in the first instant, the imperative is to resist the seductions of consumerism that more “things” will make us safe, happy, and better. Judging by the mass of TV ads, the great trifecta of well-being turns out to be more drugs, more new cars, and more electronic devices. Wesley’s dictum invites resistance against these offers, an insistence that another drug, another new car, or another electronic device will not enhance our existence.

Mature materiality, however, will linger longer over the imperative verb, “save.” Whatever Wesley intended, this verb of mandate must be taken more fully. A responsible practice of materiality might consider two other dimensions of saving. First, save the earth as our natural habitat. The earth is now being wasted and devastated by our industrial practice of excessive fossil-energy use coupled with a throwaway attitude toward consumer products. Mature materiality will usefully take a plunge into the inimitable work of Wendell Berry, our great apostle of frugality:

We have only one choice. We must either properly care for all of it [nature] or continue our lethal damage to all of it.⁴

In the age of industrialism, this relationship [of mutuality between nature and human beings] has been radically brought down to a pair of hopeless assumptions: that the natural world is passively subject either to unlimited pillage as a “natural resource,” or to partial and selective protection as “the environment.”⁵

We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do.⁶

We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to “need.”⁷

It is surely the duty of the older generation to be embarrassingly old-fashioned.⁸

Such a saving is not storing up for one’s self; it is rather saving in a way that articulates our lives as a part of a larger web of creaturely life to which we may contribute. The great decision for materiality is to be a contributor to creaturely well-being or to be a user who diminishes and exhausts our common creatureliness.

Second, our mandate to “save all you can” means to save our neighbors. In the Bible the “quadrilateral of vulnerability” includes widows, orphans, immigrants, and the poor (see Deut. 24:19–22), all those who have no standing or leverage in a predatory patriarchal economy. Such saving would entail sustained acts of charity whereby the disadvantaged share in the wealth and property of the community. Ownership is everything! Beyond charity, however, the great marker of saving the neighbor in the Bible concerns the regular cancellation of debt, and that in a society that willfully creates a debtor class in order to ensure a pool of cheap labor! Thus Moses provides for a periodic cancellation of debt in the “year of remission” (Deut. 15:1–18) and a restoration of lost property in the practice of Jubilee (Lev. 25). The Lord’s Prayer, the one that Christians pray most habitually, has at its center a petition for debt forgiveness: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matt. 6:12).⁹ The intent of these provisions is to preclude the formation of a permanent poverty class and to permit the disadvantaged to participate in a viable economic life.

Clearly “save all you can” draws energy away from a simple private accumulation of money to a wise deployment of money for the sake of the neighborhood and for a neighborly creation.

Third, give all you can. Responsible materiality depends upon glad generosity that is grounded in deep gratitude for the gift of life in all its abundance. In a society of competition among individuals for scarce goods, the pressure to get ahead is without restraint. But responsible materiality does not inhabit a world of scarce goods. Rather it resides in a creation of God’s good abundance. Thus responsible materiality is exactly a contradiction to the impulse for competitive accumulation. The ground for generosity is the awareness that the world is funded by a generous, active God who has made creation as a gift that keeps on giving, and that we are on the receiving end of that endless gift-giving! Thus we need not and cannot imagine that we are self-made or self-sufficient. Nor does it follow that “I made my money and it belongs to me.” Responsible materiality recognizes that we are each and all embedded in a life-giving network, and we are permitted the glorious chance to be full participants in and contributors to that life-giving network.

Three matters seem particularly important. In contemporary society we are very much prone to ad hoc practices of generosity (such as crowdfunding) in response...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Also by Walter Brueggemann
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Jim Wallis
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Money
• 2. Food
• 3. The Body
• 4. Time
• 5. Place
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Excerpt from Sabbath as Resistance, New Edition with Study Guide: Saying No to the Culture of Now, by Walter Brueggemann