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Debra Rienstra is right—Christians need to talk about economics.

This is the second in a two-part series of responses to the Christian Reformed Church Synod of 2023.

We invited several members of the Christian Reformed Church to respond to this summer’s Synod. More responses are coming next week.

Thinking through narrative is Jesus’ primary pedagogical mode: a man goes on a journey, a woman searches for a coin, a son goes astray, a servant makes a bad investment. Whatever the perspective, there is ample evidence that societal attitudes—on whatever issue, whether toward smoking or politics, war or sexuality—are affected more by story than by law. Thus, stories both encourage and constrain us, depending on our ability to critically interpret and respond to these narratives.

Hearing the plea of the Syrian Orthodox, I realized that no one had ever laid a claim on me because I bore the name of Christ. “Christian” was the box that I checked in surveys and governmental forms to distinguish myself from Muslims or Hindus.

Can we shield ourselves from these anxieties altogether – I think not: Paul most certainly does not promise us a quiet life, any more than our beloved Lord Jesus does. But the transformation of anxiety through prayer, and its mysterious enfolding in the joy and peace of the Trinitarian life, though the Spirit and in Christ: this is indeed our Pauline heritage and we must urgently reclaim it to be effective ambassadors of the gospel at all.

All of earth’s empires crumble. Caligula’s did. I pray not, but possibly, someday, even the United States will crumble. The Apostle Paul taught that any religious system which humans have constructed with merely physical elements will disintegrate. Jesus told us that any religious power which has attached itself to the building blocks of an earthly nation will be left with not one stone standing an another.