Theology of Tax - Christian Aid

At out meeting on the 29th September 2010 we looked at Christian Aid's campaign to Trace the Tax

This campaign looks at the way that companies can avoid paying taxes, both legal and illegal ways. This often results in developing countries not getting the tax revenue that they should get. Christian Aid is campaigning for transparency so people can see in which countries companies are actually declaring profits.

See Theology - Christian Aid: The Gospel and the rich: theological views of tax. which looks at the theology that underpins this campaign.

We started by thinking about attitudes to tax, in general individuals and companies see tax as something to be minimized as much as possible. There is a resentment of the tax that is taken by the government. Yet when we look at what tax is taken for, what it is spent on we (generally) value those services, eg. schools, health services etc. Often we make a distinction between tax avoidance (legal) and tax evasion (illegal) but I think that CA's paper challenges us about this distinction. How far should we, as Christians, go in reducing our tax? There are no easy answers to this question.

The notion that taxation is a kind of coercive and illicit appropriation of goods (and indirectly labour) that rightfully belongs to the taxpayer plays an important part in Anglo-American political rhetoric.

For Christians, assertions of such ‘rights’ cannot provide the most fundamental level of moral discourse .... Christian ethics is in the last analysis not a matter of rights, duties and laws. The Christian life is a response to one simple fact, that what God wants for his people is ‘to worship him, to be his friends, to eat with him’. The earth does not belong to the property-owner, for human titles to wealth are relativised by the deeper truth that ‘the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it’ (Psalm 24:1). The fundamental category with which we need to understand the material world is as gift not as possession. And the purpose of the gift is communion (page 23/24).

CA's paper takes as a starting point the idea of relational theology, which is informed by the work of Karl Barth. God is a God in relationship, ie. the Trinity. God is also in relationship with us. We then are in relation with God and with our neighbour. The parable of the good Samaritan tells us something of Jesus' idea of who our neigbour is and so when we, or multi-nation companies, avoid paying taxes that we should pay we are damaging that relationship with our neighbour.

It follows from all this that the avoidance of tax, just as much as the illegal evasion of tax, constitutes a wrong or broken relationship between people and state, as does the failure of a state to collect the tax that it is owed. The fact that probably the majority of individual and corporate taxpayers do not see tax avoidance in these terms is an instance of the structural sin referred to earlier (page 6).

 The paper is very good and worth reading in full, not only for the underlying theology that informs the debate but for the examples of how this issues affects the lives of people in the developing world.

Life is not...

R.S. Thomas writes, “Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you.” We find our home in the moment even as we seek to become something more than who we are in that moment. This places our home in the present, but assures that it is never static. To claim such a static home would be to pitch our tent in Babylon and embrace exile apart from the transforming work of God. The Kingdom is here and now, but it is never just here and now. We must always be seeking God as we make our home in God.

Julie Clawson

Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks - The Case for God

For our first meeting after the summer break we watched a short programme made by Rabbi Sacks. He invited four people who didn't believe in god to speak to question him about his understanding of god.

One was the novelist Howard Jacobson, a secular jew. Jacobson's main problem with Judaism was the idea that god might be interesting in the minutia of his life, the rules about what can be eaten etc. Sacks disagreed, feeling that it was vital that our day to day lives are patterned by our faith.

I can't remember the names of the other guests! One was a scientist who saw no place for god, thinking that as we learn more and more about our world the space for god becomes smaller and smaller.

Another guest, again a secular jew, challenged Sacks for his response to the holocaust, asking where god is in that kind of situation? how does the believing jew respond. Sacks was clear that for him the response of faith was to fight against that kind of injustice, that god was there with the victims. That we should cry out against injustice.

It was an interesting programme that sparked some good discusion within the group.

our last meeting before the summer.... poverty

When we meet in july we looked at poverty and how it can be defined and understood very differently.

Should poverty be measured in absolute terms (eg. $1 a day) or is it better to define poverty in relation to the wealth of others in the same (or even a different) society.

creeds

In a previous meeting we had looked at the doctrine of the trinity, this led us on to looking at creeds and how the idea of the trinity developed and became fixed (to some extent) in the ancient creeds that we still say in church today.

We decided to follow on from this by looking at what is a modern example of a creed, and that is the Basis of faith of the Evangelical Alliance.

This had been revised in 2005, the previous version had been written in 1970. 

It was interesting both to look at the content of the latest statement but also to compare the two and think about what had caused the compilers to change their ideas.

There were many differences, not least in terms of language, the 1970 statement used language that was not even usual for it's time being very formal and legal. The 2005 version used far more ordinary language. The 2005 version was also more inclusive re. women and men, the 1970 version spoke entirely about 'man' and 'men'. The 2005 version was quite a bit longer and often, it seemed, more explicit. We thought that perhaps this was as some ideas had being challenged since the 1970 statement was drawn up. For example there was no mention of Jesus' virgin birth in the 1970 statement but in 2005 it was mentioned, is this because in the gap between these statements people had questioned the idea of the virgin birth? In addition to being more explicit it introduced ideas about how evangelical christians should act, ie. to have concern for creation, justice and love, the 1970 version was almost entirely concerned with what evangelicals believed (should believe?).

There was a feeling that as soon as you try and put belief into a statement like this you create problems of interpretation, that you are both forced to try and be very precise without ever actually being able to completely nail down a meaning.

Personally I think that by their very nature creeds & statements of faith have the effect of excluding certain people (those who cannot sign up for it) from the group that has produced it. They are about defining who is in and who is out, who is orthodox and who is not. Much like the issues we currently have in the Anglican Communion in which different groups find it impossible to accept that others believe different things about, for example, woman being bishops. 

Certainly there were some members of our group that would not have been able to sigh up for the whole of the Evangelical Alliance's Basis of Faith.

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Next meeting we'll be thinking about poverty, what is it and what can/should we do about it?

wwjvf?

Who Would Jesus Vote For?

Not a serious discussion of which party Jesus would have supported at the recent election but a way into thinking about the election and how we as christians should decide how to vote.

An interesting, and robust, discussion followed and in particular highlighted different approaches to support for poorer people in society. On one had seeing this as principally the Government's responsibility (through taxation) and on the other hand the responsibility of society as a whole with a special responsibility on those who are wealthy to intervene.

Poverty is a topic we will come back to at a future meeting.

sayings from the cross

For our first meeting after lent we looked at the seven sayings from the cross. As an exercise we had the sayings printed out on separate pieces of paper and were asked as a group to match them to the four different gospels. The seven sayings (in alphabetical order!):

• I thirst
• It is finished.
• Father forgive them, for they know not what they do
• Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.
• My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
• My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
• Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise
• Woman, behold your son: behold your mother

I know there are 8 here, but one is in two gospels.

We scored about 50% how well can you do?

My thoughts in doing this exercise were to highlight the way we can conflate the gospels into one and that perhaps this is not always a good idea as each gospel is telling the story of Jesus in a particular way. In the end we only scored about 50% (not sure what we would get if we just randomly assigned the sayings, Jane or Doug any thoughts?).

lost gospels

At our meeting before lent (yes ages ago I know). We watched a programme about the many gospels that didn't make it into the bible. Many of these were written much later than the gospels that we find in the New Testament. Although the early church did not consider that these gospels should be included in what became the New Testament it was still interesting to see what kind of picture they painted of Jesus. What came across was the extent to which different writers 'saw' Jesus differently and told his story in a particular way to make a particular point. Something that we can see in the very different accounts we get in the four New Testament gospels as well.

This could be seen as a problem, eg. which of these accounts is the 'correct' one or it could be seen as an advantage as it shows there is not one orthodox way of seeing and understanding Jesus and his significance.

the trinity

At our meeting on the 2nd June we we looked at the Gospel reading from the previous Sunday (John 16.12-15), which was Trinity Sunday. We had an interesting discussion about the development of the doctrine of the trinity and how long this took to become the established view of the church, finally being decided at church councils 325 and 381.

This lead to a discussion of creeds and how and why they were formed. To some extent at least they were concerned with defining who was and was not an orthodox christian. This still happens today and we looked at an example of a modern day 'creed'. The Evangelical Alliances Basis of Faith Statement, which we look at in more detail next week.

Below are some thoughts of Katharine Jefferts Schori the Presiding Bishop of the Anglican Churtch in North America.

http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/archives/004388.html

The willingness to live in tension is a hallmark of Anglicanism, beginning from its roots in Celtic Christianity pushing up against Roman Christianity in the centuries of the first millennium. That diversity in community was solidified in the Elizabethan Settlement, which really marks the beginning of Anglican Christianity as a distinct movement. Above all, it recognizes that the Spirit may be speaking to all of us, in ways that do not at present seem to cohere or agree. It also recognizes what Jesus says about the Spirit to his followers, "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come" (John 16:12-13).

Robert Rowland Smith on Feeling Lonely

http://theschooloflife.typepad.com/the_school_of_life/2010/05/robert-rowland-smith-on-feeling-lonely-1.html

I liked the idea of "essential solitude".

The "real meaning of Christmas"

Well for our first meeting of 2010 we thought a little about the "real meaning of Christmas". A much used phrase, but what do we mean by it? What would Christmas look like if we stripped away all the cultural baggage that has been attached to it?

Well, not surprisingly, we didn't really come up with a definitive answer to this question, but on the way we did think about how the season of Christmas developed within the church and how it related to other existing pagan festivals. We also looked at Epiphany and found that this became part of the church calendar before Christmas. We also considered the church calendar in general and the two cycles of Christmas (based around a fixed date) and Easter (based around a moveable Sunday). This is why we get two variable periods of "ordinary time" between the two different cycles. One after Candlemas on 2nd Feb until lent starts, and one from the end of pentecost until advent.