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I thought as a way to prepare ourselves to receive the concluding lecture today, I would like to invite us to take a moment to meditate on a scripture reading that I believe embodies the spirit that informs Dr. Dempsey's presentation. The scripture reading comes from the book of Ephesians, whose author shares with Dr. Dempsey a passionate commitment to overcome all that keeps God's people divided.

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A predestination-type sense of the divine and intention for unity for the human family as constituting the mystery of God's purpose and meaning for humanity. A sense of urgency without despair that either we unite or we shall perish together. A conviction that the tragic division among us can be healed when we move toward Christ. and that the church matters and has a major role in overcoming barriers and in enabling the emergence of communities of care.

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They also share an ethical insight that the central moral component of a faithful life is to bring unity within the human family and that is possible within our context. And ultimately they share a deep-rooted faith that what motivates us in this struggle toward unity is not that we gain the satisfaction of our innermost needs and interests, but that we obey God's will for humanity and for the whole of creation. Let us listen for the word of God as given in the book of Ephesians, chapter 1, verses 3 to 10.

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Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as He chooses us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before Him in love. He destined us for adoption as His children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace that He freely bestowed upon us in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace that He lavished on us.

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With all wisdom and insight He has made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure that He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Him, things in heaven, things on earth. Let us meditate for a moment in this scripture reading. The word of the Lord. Thanks to God.

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It is my pleasure this morning to introduce our distinguished lecturer, Dr. Jane Dempsey Douglas, Hazel Thompson McCord Professor of Historical Theology Emerita from Princeton Theological Seminary. Dr. Dempsey has a doctorate degree from Harvard University in the area of history and the philosophy of religion with specialization and church history.

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She is also the recipient of three honorary doctorate degrees, one from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, one from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and from Franklin Marshall College. I wanted to mention that because my two colleagues that introduced her before did not mention it, and I really want to reassure you that she has gone to school, she did her homework, and got her degrees. She has served as teacher and faculty at Princeton Theological Seminary, the School of Theology at Claremont, and Harvard Divinity School.

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Author and editor of five books in the areas of mission, gender relationships, and the confessions of the Reformed tradition. Her 1985 book, Woman, Freedom, and published by Winsminster, has been published in Dutch, English, Portuguese, and soon to be published in Spanish. Her articles are just too many to mention.

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She has served as editor of many distinguished journals, has distinguished herself as an international lecturer, as an active church member who has a keen sense of the church catholic. She is also a mother of three children, and a wife. Dr.

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Dempsey, thank you in advance for being with us. We look forward to your concluding remarks in the lecture titled Christian Solidarity in a Changing World Order. Dr. Dempsey.

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Thank you very much. You have been asking for artwork. And I confess that I did not bring it, but I'm going to begin by describing a piece of artwork, and so I ask you to use your imaginations to see it hanging on the wall back here above the cross as I describe it. A wonderful mural was painted in 1992 on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage to the New World.

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by a young Bolivian Christian woman named Jacqueline Ticona. She comes from the indigenous Aymara people who live in the high Altiplano region of the Andes Mountains in the Lake Titicaca Basin. The background of the mural is a multicolored flag symbolizing many nations. Superimposed on this patchwork of colors, of the diversity of nations,

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is a large circle of life, a circle where animals, human beings, and plants are interconnected. The life is vigorous, thriving green plants and colorful flowers, animals of various sorts, including the llama, people working as miners and farmers, people celebrating and dancing, an Aymata family symbolizing the community. It is clear that all of this life is interdependent. The beauty and exuberance of the circle of life is visibly broken at one place by three intruding sailing ships.

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Long spears protrude menacingly from the bows of the ships. The masts in the shape of crosses are reflected in shadows on the beach. The religion which came with the invaders is portrayed as merely a shadow of Christianity because it came with spears and swords, with violence that broke the circle of life. This invasion brought death to large numbers of the indigenous people by war and by diseases formerly unknown.

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Coming from the ship are sheep. imported by the Spaniards, bringing death to the vegetation. The sheep eat the grass, I'm told, all the way down to the ground, whereas the llamas leave part of the plant to grow again. There are other evidences of the threat to the circle of life.

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Miners protesting exploitation, pesticides being sprayed on farm workers. In the center of the circle is Jesus Christ, portrayed as a sturdy, brown-skinned Aymara man, dressed in traditional clothing, a simple poncho. He is not standing, but walking, a dynamic person moving toward the future. His feet are bare, treading lightly on the vegetation of the earth,

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symbolizing the Imada's close relation to the land. He is not a conquering Christ, but Emmanuel, God with us, with open hands, ready to welcome all who come to him. On the poncho that he wears, across the front of the poncho, are nine small squares, symbolizing aspects of the historical and present reality of Latin America, and the sins of humanity which Christ is bearing.

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Among these are divisions among people, poverty, external debt, that is public debt owed to creditors outside the country. The mural is a statement of faith in the midst of the pain and violence because Christ is present in the midst and sharing the pain. It is a statement of hope because Christ is carrying the sins of the world, welcoming us, and moving us into the future. But it is also a superb statement of the solidarity of Christ with humanity, of the solidarity of the

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human family and of the solidarity of humans with creation. When the integrity of the circle of life is broken by violence and exploitation, the whole circle of life suffers. Last week, quite by coincidence, I read a letter by one of our PCUSA mission co-workers in Latin America, Hunter Farrell. He had visited this same windswept, poverty-stricken altiplano region of Bolivia, and there he met Jose, the youngest of five children.

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He guessed that Jose was about seven years old, like his son. As they talked, it was evident that Jose had significant mental retardation. A local community worker explained that Jose was really 10 years old, but had suffered stunted physical growth and intellectual development because of chronic malnutrition.

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His family simply could not produce enough surplus potato and barley and mutton to nourish this family properly. Hunter Farrell thought, There but by the grace of God go my children. Then he realized, If God is our Father, then Jose is my child, or at least my brother's child.

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If I believe that Jose and his family are, together with me and my loved ones, part of the body of Christ, then his malnutrition weakens me and all of us. This story is another way to express the solidarity reflected in Jacqueline Ticona's mural. It is ironic and tragic that the new world order of economic globalization, which is drawing our lives ever closer to people in other parts of the world, is also setting the people of the North, that is Europe and North America, at odds with the people of the South, that is Asia, Africa, Latin America. We are closer because of electronic communication, which makes it impossible for us not to know about Jose's hunger.

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We are closer because of jet travel, which allows us to reach cities in Bolivia or on the other side of the world in hours, no longer the months it used to take a century ago. Yet we in the north are increasingly perceived by those in the countries of the south as invaders who break the circle of life. For example, one significant influence in the collapse of the Asian economies recently was massive speculation, the speculative movement of capital, a sort of economic invasion.

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Traders bid up Asian stocks through short-term investment, then pulled out, taking their profits, and let the stock market collapse. For example, the pesticides being sprayed on the IMATA field workers may well be American-made chemicals banned for use in American fields because they're too toxic, so the manufacturers sell them abroad. As another example, factories in the countries of the South manufacturing shoes and clothing for Americans and European companies Products which may even be sold as luxury goods in the North may well be forcing employees, mostly young women, to work long hours for wages below the cost of minimal standards of living in unsanitary workplaces which damage the employee's health and damage the environment.

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Another example, international lending agencies set up by the governments of the North require countries of the south to make structural adjustments in their economies in order to pay their external debts. The governments, in turn, reduce their spending, reduce government subsidies for basic foods, public transportation, public health services, and public education. As a result, the poor go hungry, they cannot pay the rising bus fare to get to work,

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Their clinics have no medicine or x-ray film or bandages, and children drop out of school because they cannot pay the fees or buy their books. In this situation, the church has a remarkable opportunity to serve the cause of justice. The church has the capacity, as perhaps no other institution, to bring together people from the north and from the south who share a commitment to human rights and social justice, who understand God's special advocacy for the poor, who know how to mobilize public voices to press for just solutions to extraordinary problems, who grasp the

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artists' vision that when the circle of life is broken, all creation suffers. Who believe that in the body of Christ, when one member suffers, all suffer. As the churches of the rich countries of the north stand in solidarity with the churches of the poor countries of the south in the struggle for economic justice, a fresh witness to Christian unity emerges. As the poor have grown poorer over recent years while the rich get richer in the new global economy, some Christians of different traditions, not just Presbyterians, have begun to say that the appalling suffering of the poor worldwide constitutes a life and death situation where the very stones cry out for justice.

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The World Alliance of Reformed Churches organized a series of regional consultations on economic justice. The African consultation held in Kitwe, Zambia in 1995 reflects the fact that Africa as a region is experiencing the most devastating economic problems of any region. The consultation issued a powerful indictment of the global market economy claiming that it, quote, usurps the sovereignty of God, claiming a freedom that belongs to God alone.

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For us Christians, this raises the question of idolatry and of loyalty to God or mammon. The idolatrous and dehumanizing nature of the contemporary global economy is seen in the exclusion of Africa and Africans from the human family. This denial of our humanity is a direct contradiction of the faith that we were created by God in God's image, end quote. This declaration draws the, quote, painful conclusion that the African reality of poverty caused by an unjust economic world order has gone beyond an ethical problem and become a theological one.

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it now constitutes a status confessionis. The gospel to the poor is at stake in the very mechanism of the global economy today, end quote. The consultation called on the World Alliance to hold a gathering of churches from the south to study these questions in advance of the worldwide General Council in Hungary in 1997, and it called on the then upcoming General Council to quote, Consider the calling of a confessing movement of the churches of the South and others who are in solidarity with them, end quote.

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What is the meaning of this term status confessionis? It has been used in different ways since its origin in the 16th century Protestant movement. Usually it means that the matter in question cannot be considered among the Adiophora or indifferent matters on which Christians may legitimately differ.

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Rather, it means that it is essential to the heart of the Christian faith and therefore belongs to the confession of faith. It is in this sense that the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in 1982 invoked Status Confessionis in suspending the membership of the white South African churches which had given theological justification to the system of apartheid. The Alliance argued that that theological justification of apartheid was heresy, a deformation of the very heart of the Christian faith.

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Christians, therefore, must make a decision to repudiate this theological justification of apartheid if they are to remain within the Christian family. What was at stake was not simply a disagreement over an ethical matter, but the very nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ. At other times, the term has been used somewhat differently, identifying a confessional moment when a very serious crisis must be addressed in faithfulness to the lordship of Christ. This confession addresses situations in the world where evil seems overwhelming, even demonic.

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The confession denies any claim that this evil lies outside the realm of faith's authority. It is in this sense, I believe, that some German Lutheran and Reformed churches invoked Status Confessionis with regard to nuclear weapons in a long process going back into the 1950s. And it is in this sense, I think, that the Kitway consultation used the term status confessiones as a confessing moment. The crisis of global economic injustice was indeed at the top of the agenda at the Alliance General Counsel in Debretsen in 1997.

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Aware of possible confusion over the meaning of this term status since it's used in different ways in different contexts. When the council was at that time still preoccupied with the apartheid question in the South African churches and aware that the discussion of global economic justice in the churches was only barely beginning, the council voted to call on the member churches to undertake, quote, A committed process of progressive recognition education, and confession concerning economic injustice and ecological destruction, end quote.

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The council said, quote, We are challenged by the cry of the people who suffer and by the groaning of creation. We Christians of reformed churches are aware of our complicity in an economic order that is unfair and oppressive. leading to the misery and deaths of many people. We participate in attitudes and practices which erode the foundations of the earth's livelihood.

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We want to affirm the gift of life. We consider this affirmation of life, commitment to resistance, and struggle for transformation to be an integral part of reformed faith and confession today. End quote. Member churches were asked to engage their members in economic education, to challenge their members to develop a lifestyle which rejects the materialism and consumerism of our day, to work towards the formulation of a confession of their beliefs about economic life which would express justice in the whole household of God and reflect priority for the poor.

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and support an ecologically sustainable future, to act in solidarity with the victims of injustice as they struggle to overcome unjust economic powers and destructive ecological activities, and to examine how the churches themselves use and invest their money. A commitment was made to work with other Christians and ecumenical bodies, as well as all other people of goodwill to engage the United Nations agencies, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in dialogue to seek review of their policies in the light of their adverse effects on the people of developing countries. I hope you will reflect soberly on the theological commitments which underlie these actions and their implications.

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Reformed people have a long, long history of attempting to unmask idolatry. This is a theme that goes right back to our roots in the 16th century. And these actions reflect a sense that our culture has accorded to the free market an autonomy that belongs to God alone. This is a form of idolatry.

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It is a fact that human beings have created our current global economic system and human beings must accept responsibility to control it. Therefore, our churches must become communities of resistance to the sins of exploiting human beings who are all equally made in the image of God and of exploiting the creation God has given us as our home. How do communities of resistance come into being? They are galvanized by the awareness of the magnitude of evil and the awareness of their own responsibility and capability to bring about change.

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Remember those French Huguenots we often hear about during World War II in Chambon-Cyrlignon in France, who sheltered Jews at great risk to their own lives, This is a remarkable story. Afterwards, they explained very undramatically that it was simply normal to do so. When they were pressed, well, you know, why did you do this?

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They said they had been taught Jesus' commands to feed the hungry and visit the prisoners. And they remembered the suffering of their own ancestors at times of religious persecution. This image of their own tradition and past in dealing with persecution has shaped their identity as a Christian people. And so they did what they could, individually and collectively.

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Their small community could not change the course of the war or end the death camps, but they saved many Jewish lives by their communal commitment to protect human life. How would we go about, in our congregations, educating Christian people to accept as normal, courageous acts of human solidarity? That's what Christian education must receive as a challenge today, I think. The Alliance's call for a process of confession is one way to begin.

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This would be a process of studying the biblical teaching about economic life, and the Bible says a great deal, particularly in the Old Testament, about economic life. Analyzing our own economic activity and that of our churches in the light of that teaching. Learning how our economic activity affects others, especially the poor. and placing ourselves in solidarity with those who suffer as we together struggle to bring about change.

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But notice I said together. This has to be the churches of the north and the churches of the south together. Each of these elements is important and each requires us to open ourselves to a critique of our lives by the word of God and by our brothers and sisters in the faith. To call this a confessional process is to acknowledge that there is an urgent crisis confronting us all, and we do not have the option to set it aside.

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God is Lord of all life, including economic life. If we are to be faithful, we must make a decision to examine our lives. A response to this call has come from the Presbyterian Church of Korea in a 1998 statement entitled Surmounting the Current Economic Crisis: A Statement of Faith by the Presbyterian Church of Korea. This substantial statement of faith came out of the shock of the Asian economic collapse which galvanized the attention of the church.

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The church appears stunned by the suddenness of the Korean economy's decline, by the lack of awareness of the serious problems which created the crisis, and by the degree of human suffering it caused. Quote, An alarming increase in jobless, homeless, people without hope, and in suicide rates, all resulting from the collapse of the nation and the bankruptcy of individual businesses, end quote. Particular companies are named, and astonishment expressed that their illegal handling of funds went undetected for so long. Quote, in a country where companies brashly misappropriate loans for land speculation and go bankrupt with 10 times their assets left in unpaid debts, where the taxes paid by honest, hardworking people are then used to bail out these insolvent companies,

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where although the company goes bankrupt, the owner still retains his personal wealth and continues his wealthy lifestyle, bearing no social, moral, or legal responsibilities whatsoever. How can the economy fail to collapse? End quote. The church's response is an attempt to discern God's will for our time, to repent of its sins,

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to study the task and the responsibility of the church with relation to the economy, and to carry out faithfully the mandate given to it. The root of the crisis is seen to be the society's spiritual depravity and ethical corruption, which the church is called to address. But the church identifies its own sin. Quote, We must repent that the church,

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wrongly thinking that faith and economics are separate, has not taught the need for a correct economic ethics and has not correctly criticized unjust economic actions and values. Using this crisis as an opportunity, the church, we believe, must endeavor to formulate a correct understanding of the relationships between Christian faith and the economy. The Church must positively reflect on the just economic community of the Kingdom of God, and take a leading role in criticizing and correcting the current unjust and immoral economic reality. A self-examination of the economic activity and lifestyle of the individual Christian and the Christian community is also necessary.

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End quote. This Korean statement of faith reviews the biblical teaching about work, about God's ownership of the earth, about the need to reward labor justly and provide rest for workers and animals, about God's special concern for the poor, and God's stern warnings to those who oppress the poor. Quote, Calvin also warned that because wealth and prosperity are a gift from God, they must be used for God's good purposes and that excessive greed will turn the gift of wealth into an idol of mammon.

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Standing firm in this biblical view of the relationship between the economy and the Christian faith, the church actively takes the responsibility of being a prophet toward this world which worships wealth and economic affluence and blatantly tramples on the freedom, justice, and human rights of the individual under the mistaken values and ideologies of materialism, end quote. There is also a catalog of the inequities of the world's economic order, citing as an example a World Bank report that about 25% of the world's population are in a state of absolute poverty without adequate food or water.

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The church pledges to, quote, take an active role in reforming the world economic order into a just structure and also in providing aid for the poorest of our neighbor countries, end quote, and to support the ecumenical movement's call for a jubilee to release the debts of the poorest countries. Finally, there is a call for the Korean churches to reexamine their own lives and values, to see the wrongness of their toleration of Christians who amassed wealth illegally and unethically, to call Christians to simpler lives of sufficiency and thrift, to conduct all church financial matters with transparency, to avoid materialistic measuring of the church's success by numbers and wealth, and to channel much more of its resources to serve the needs of the many persons in need for whom there is no government safety net. Let us reflect on what this document is and what it is not.

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It is explicitly a statement of faith. an acknowledgement that matters of economic life are under the authority of God, and that Christians are accountable to God for them. It is a pledge to change the church's orientation, to look frankly at matters of justice which had previously been ignored, to open its own financial life to scrutiny, to enter into relationships of solidarity with the poor and others who are working for justice.

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In this sense, the Korean Presbyterian Church is surely entering into the process of confession which the Alliance has called for, and it will find itself in a network of other churches undertaking the same commitment around the world. Still, this document is not an analysis of the economic situation. nor does it offer any proposals for the change of the economic system. That task still lies ahead.

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Most theologians are not trained in economics, sometimes called the other religion. Bringing together economists and theologians to help each other think about just solutions to our global problems is a much needed service that the church has only recently begun to undertake. It will be increasingly important in the process of confession to which the churches are being called. A quite different response to Debretson's call to the churches to engage in a process of confession is that of the United Church of Canada.

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There, the moderator has begun a consultation on faith and the economy, which is being carried on largely on the internet. in the hopes of involving a much broader representation of the church than is usually possible. There are various papers placed on a website and people are reacting to the papers and already there's apparently a rather lively debate in the church. Moderator Bill Phipps said this, quote, Many Canadians are deeply disturbed by our market-driven economy

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which changes people from citizens into consumers, distorts reality, demeans the human spirit, and plunders the earth. They know something is terribly wrong. Caught in the tentacles of principalities and powers beyond our control, we search for leadership, analysis, and initiatives which respond to the depth and diversity of the human spirit. For many of us, the issue is a spiritual one.

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What are human beings for? How do we view human community and the earth itself? Through what lens do we see the world and our place in it? It cannot be denied that we live in a time of severe disruption, and we cannot return to the packaged positions of the past.

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but is the future of the human community and of the earth itself to be determined by a pathological devotion to this global market whose so-called invisible hand has no conscience, end quote. Let me point to some of the other ways in which churches today are building Christian solidarity between north and south in a search for economic justice. First, I'd like to mention the style in which the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. produced.

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its General Assembly report of 1996 entitled Hope for a Global Future: Toward Just and Sustainable Human Development. The task force made a decision at the outset that its study must be informed by the voices of people from the South. So they invited two Christians engaged in development work for the churches of the South, one from the Philippines and one from Cameroon, to join in the work of the task force, meeting with them and helping to shape the study.

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The task force also made a visit to Christian groups engaged in development work in Honduras, groups accompanying the poor in their attempt to improve their lives in a sustainable way. The task force was able to make firsthand observations of the difference in style between that work and commercial development in Honduras focused on short-term profit without regard to the health of the workers or of the environment. The resulting report remains a valuable resource for congregational study, especially because it was shaped by the experience of Christian solidarity between the north and the south.

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A second example is the ecumenical coalition gathered around the project of Jubilee 2000. Drawing on the biblical concept of Jubilee, a recurring time to release debtors from their debts in order to avoid creation of a permanent subclass within Israelite society. Jubilee 2000 today calls for accelerated debt relief for the forty-one HIPC countries, H-I-P-C, that is highly indebted poor countries.

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These are the poorest countries with the heaviest debt load. This initiative has been taken, has been broadly endorsed by Christian bodies, including the U.S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches, several major denominations, including PCUSA, Oxfam International, Bread for the World, the World Council of Churches, and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches.

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What specifically is Jubilee 2000 hoping to accomplish? The movement is calling for an acceleration in forgiveness of external debt owed by those 41 HIPC, highly indebted poor countries, mostly located in Africa. so that relief will be available in 2000, not years from now, but in 2000. Two of these hippic countries in the western hemisphere are Honduras and Bolivia, where we began our reflections this morning.

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Virtually all of the debts of these countries are owed to official governmental creditors, not to private banks. In some cases, repayment equal to the amount borrowed has already been made, but interest continues to raise the amount owed. Jubilee 2000 calls for creation of an independent commission to supervise the process, a commission bringing together debtors and creditors and international financial institutions. The commission would reconstruct remission packages on a case-by-case basis,

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taking into account each country's circumstances and the record of the creditors and the debtors. The remission process would especially consider situations where there is a high level of human need or environmental distress, would give voice to ordinary people of the country in organizing the debt remission, and in planning the future of the country's economies. Though the Jubilee campaign hopes to bring significant debt relief to 41 countries this year, it does not solve the external debt problem. It does not necessarily cancel all debt even for the 41 HIPC countries, and it does not include any of the middle-indebted countries, many of which are also strangled by external debt.

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Nonetheless, the concerted campaign aided significantly by the support of churches, has raised consciousness of the problem around the world. Furthermore, it has focused attention on important issues related to the process of debt forgiveness, participation of ordinary people in policymaking, transparency in financial transactions, safeguards to be sure that the money freed from debt replacement is actually used to benefit the poor, to provide health care and schooling or other socially beneficial services.

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In other ways, the high-profile engagement of the churches as advocates for the world's poor has helped at least to some extent, to change the conversation at policy-making levels. For several years, church leaders have been inviting officials of the World Bank and other international financial organizations to meet with them to discuss the global economic crisis, and especially the problem of structural adjustment on the poor, contributing to other pressures for change. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have, in fact, recently been moving ahead plans for debt forgiveness for several of the HIPC countries.

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The governing boards of the IMF and the World Bank have mandated a broad poverty reduction effort, including the initiative for the HIPC countries and a broad poverty reduction focus in debt relief. This is the poverty reduction aspect of this is what the churches have particularly focused on. These two international bodies last month posted on their website for public comment a joint paper entitled Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, Operational Issues. They seem to have heard the importance to the world of the effects of structural adjustment on poverty.

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So the churches and the general public should read those papers and comment. Nonetheless, enormous problems with respect to external debt remain to be tackled. Anyone who followed the battle in Seattle at the World Trade Organization meeting would probably also conclude that the energetic, peaceful demonstrations, which included many church people, in favor of protections for workers and the environment, had a significant effect in changing the course of the World Trade Organization discussions.

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The tragic intrusion of violent groups did not change that fact. Church people have also been significantly engaged more informally in the broad movement in the United States against sweatshops. University students have taken the lead very effectively in pressing their administrations to guarantee that sweatshops and mugs manufactured under the university's license to carry its logo have been manufactured under humane working conditions. Other consumer networks have added pressure on American companies whose goods are manufactured in the countries of the south.

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The New York Times reported this last week that there is some evidence that this consumer movement has been successful in improving working conditions in some factories in countries of the south, though enormous problems remain. Grassroots involvement in this movement is an effective witness to our solidarity with the people of developing countries, though it is only a beginning. in the struggle against human exploitation and environmental damage done by workshops, sweatshops.