AS I SEE IT
By Martin Hattersley
Archaeologists tell us that somewhere around the year 1400 B.C., two earthquakes led, first to the temporary blocking of the Jordan river, and secondly, to the collapse of the walls of the city of Jericho. As a result of this, Joshua crossed the river Jordan on dry land, and, after a week of marching in circles and blowing trumpets, the walls of Jericho, built on insecure foundations, gave way and the city was conquered.
At the back of my mind, I cannot rid myself of the parallel of the story of Joshua with what took place this past August, when more than six hundred Anglican bishops from all over the world marched through London's financial district, to protest the debt problems and financial exploitation of the underdeveloped countries of the world. Almost immediately thereafter, banks started failing, the stock market has plunged, and the weakness of the whole Western financial system was laid bare.
It's worth understanding what has been going on here. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 by a retired Scottish buccaneer, William Patterson, who loaned the English government a million poinds worth of gold from some unspecified source, and at the same time received permission to issue a million pounds of bank notes and lend them into circulation. So one million pounds has now become two, with two streams of income coming from them to the Bank, and the English government began to be permanently in debt. (The Federal Reserve of the United States, privately owned, also operates on the same principle.) Our whole financial system works by more and more lending of this imaginary money, always involving a burden of debt to the borrower while the monetary unit also loses value to inflation.
Currently, it seems as if we dare not stop this cancerous type of growth, for fear of the unemployment and the poverty that would result from this, even when we know that such expansion will be ruinous to our environment. And if the creation of new credit through loans goes beyond what is prudent, the bubble of confidence bursts and the system collapses, as we see at the present time. The crowning insult comes when the public, through debt and taxes, is expected to finance a bailout, and to do this by borrowing more funds created by this very same banking system that it is trying to save.
The season of Advent is not just four weeks in preparation for Christmas. It is the time when the Church gives solemn consideration to the way the world is heading. Jesus has some serious words in the gospel on the whole subject, predicting wars and rumours of war, famine and distress and persecution of the faithful before his return. The book of Revelation portrays a future of false religion, wars, tyranny and persecutions, coming to a climax in Chapter 18 with the complete economic collapse of "Babylon the Great".
Jesus' instruction is not to panic. "The end is not yet". But we do look forward to a time when mankind's worship of the forces of Mammon will be ended, and mankind will accept Jesus, returning in glory, as the true ruler of a world of freedom, prosperity and peace.
