books I recommend
THE BLUE SWEATER: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected world.
By Jacqueline Novogratz. New York: Rodale Books, 2009.
“Jacqueline Novogratz is founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture capital firm for the poor that invests in sustainable enterprises.”
This book is the author’s NY Times bestselling memoir. If you are interested in the memoir, read the whole book. If you are just interested in the best ideas/observations in the book, here they are.
A microlending program in pre-genocide Rwanda financed a women’s business that the author calls “The Blue Bakery.”
Pages 79-84: The bakery produced fried dough in various shapes and the same women who made the doughnuts then took them out to sell in various offices and businesses in Kigali (the capital of Rwanda). At first there was no real system for keeping up with how many doughnuts each woman took out, so some women took out more than they reported and kept part of the money (or maybe ate the doughnuts). After feeling hurt and unappreciated, Novogratz realized that the women had no incentive to be honest, so she redid the accounting system to provide such incentives. [SD observation: If Wall Street bankers don’t hesitate to skim off other people’s money why should poor women in Africa?] Next Novogratz tried to train the women in sales techniques: look customers in the eye and invite them to buy. Speak to other passengers on the bus and ask them to buy. The women refused. Turns out this would be considered impolite. Then Novogratz tried competition among the saleswomen to see who could sell the most. No one would participate. But slowly the business grew. Then one day “I received a call from a friend who had expected the women to deliver an order of goods for a party; nothing had arrived. . . .Finally, we learned they’d all gone to the funeral of a friend thinking the order for baked goods could wait. . . .The next morning we asked the women who had attended the funeral what had happened. They answered very matter-of-factly that their friend had died and the lady with the party would have to wait. . . .” [SD: It takes a very long time for poor women to see a business as belonging to them and dependent on their efforts, their ability to keep promises, and their integrity. All the obstacles Novogratz faced were perfectly understandable and probably unavoidable. But the women’s own culture and values had to be taken into account and ways found to make “good business practices” work within their circumstances.]
Pages 132 – 134 – Haddy’s fertilizer business in the Gambia
“In one of the villages we met Haddy, an unforgettable, irrepressible fertilizer retailer probably in her forties, who knew the local farmers and understood the psychology of selling.” By this time Novogratz was working for the World Bank. She writes, “I suggested that my colleagues at the Bank wanted her opinion on their proposal to provide loans for inputs like fertilizer through large development and commercial banks.”
“ ‘Nonsense!’ Haddy explained. ‘First, we are living too far away from the banks, and second, we don’t trust them. Further, most banks don’t want to deal with farmers like us. They just want the big ones. The small farmers come to a retailer like me and borrow the money they need to plant and fertilize the harvest. You see, they have no cash and so they rely on credit until the harvest comes, and then they pay back.’
‘But how can you count on farmers repaying?’ I asked.
‘Because this is a small area and we know everyone. If I had more cash myself, then I could lend even more to the farmers. My credit to you would be strong. So you see? You have to bet only on Haddy and I will take the responsibility for making sure the others repay me so that I can repay you.’
‘How do we know you are a fair seller?’ I asked.
‘You must ask the farmers and see what they say,’ she responded. ‘I want to help change my country and I will serve it better than those big banks.’”
Novogratz was convinced. She took the idea to the woman who headed the committee. The woman objected to lending to Haddy because she did not fall into the category of “the poorest of the poor.”
“I explained that we were attempting to promote the private sector in a way that reached poor farmers. If we could find a way to help the market actually work for poor farmers, then they could make their own investments in things like fertilizers and seeds and repay when the harvest came in. They wouldn’t be waiting for an agency to give them things. I talked about needing a mind-set beyond charity to reach poor farmers: The farmers themselves were market-driven and deserved solutions that could help them sustain themselves for years.”
The woman was interested only in giving money to the poorest of the poor, not lending money to women like Haddy who already had successful businesses. Novogratz pointed out that the give-away programs had failed after 20 years of pouring money into them. She was told “You don’t know this country.” The meeting was over.
Pages 157-158 – Who gets to lead?
Novogratz is now working for a program called Next Generation Leaders funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
“In the first year I allowed NGL’s group of 24 fellows to be held hostage in their discussions by a small group of activists who verbally attacked any thoughts with which they disagreed. Though extremely talented in their fields, those individuals rarely offered constructive solutions to problems and , ironically, represented exactly what we were trying to avoid in the program: leaders who were more comfortable flinging opinions than basing arguments on principles and facts.
My biggest flaw was that I was not being true to myself. In that first year, a young African American man intimidated me in front of the fellows by claiming I could never lead the group properly because I was white, privileged, and connected to the Rockefeller establishment, which he believed had done great damage to the world. Instead of confronting him directly, I stared like a deer caught in the headlights and tried defending myself as someone who had worked hard to cover university tuition and make my way in the world. . . .It took months for me to understand that my biggest error had been trying to defend an implausible position. . . .The question wasn’t whether I was privileged, but whether that privilege disqualified me from effectively running the program. I had responded to the wrong attack---and had done so lamely, at that. Instead, I should have asked the young man why he chose to stay in a program when he disdained its host, the Rockefeller Foundation. . . In not confronting him, I let down the program and myself.”
Pages 160-161 – Mississippi catfish factory
“At the catfish factories, we saw firsthand what an unfettered private sector can do to poor people in the name of job creation: All but one of the 400 catfish processing factories in the Mississippi Delta were owned by white men, and 99 percent of the workers were black women. The women earned minimum wage and typically stood in ice-cold, bloody water for hours cutting fillets of catfish, with few breaks for lunch or the bathroom.” Novogratz and a colleague visited a factory where they talked with a woman supervisor. After much suspicion, the woman warmed up at little. “ ‘Things are a lot better now,’ she told us after a minute or two of silence. ‘Why?’ Lisa asked. ‘The line is safer now, we can take breaks, and our hours are not as bad as they used to be. People aren’t getting hurt as much.’ ‘What happened?’ Lisa pushed. Leaning over the table, she looked at us and with her index finger traced a big, invisible U for ‘union.’ In whispers, she talked about how young Easterners had come down to Mississippi to discuss the power of unions. The workers had risked everything, she said. ‘Some of us were fired and, you know, we didn’t have no cushion to keep us eating. But we helped each other, and we kept at it, and we made it.’ . . . The Delta also reminded me of how easily capitalism can be manipulated to oppress the most vulnerable. Good public policy must accompany market-oriented solutions that are undergirded with an imperative of moral leadership. We need to ask more questions about who is awarded public contracts, who gains, who loses, and whether or not our public funds are doing the most possible for the most people rather than benefiting just a few.”
Page 229 – Patient capital
Novogratz founded Acumen Fund. “Our investment style was focused on what we termed patient capital---not traditional charity, not traditional business investment, but something in-between. Patient capital is money invested over a longer period of time with the acknowledgment that returns might be below market, but with a wide range of management support services to nurture the company [being invested in] to liftoff and beyond. If it were easy to start a business serving the poor, patient capital would not be necessary. It’s not easy. Social entrepreneurs focused on serving low-income markets work against all odds of success, facing enormous individual and institutional challenges. The only chance to overcome these hurdles is to combine an extraordinary entrepreneur with the kind of support that neither traditional investors nor charities can provide.”
Pages 230-231 – Drishtee telecommunications company in India – Satyan Mishra
Mishra is described as “a visionary entrepreneur who was focused first and foremonst on supporting the poor by building a large-scale information distribution system. . . .His vision was to establish a network of tele-kiosks, one in each of India’s 650,000 villages. A tele-kiosk, he explained, was a small store where a local entrepreneur would set himself up with a computer, a phone, and a camera. He would sell a range of services, from computer training classes to international calls to taking family photographs and sending them to relatives over the Internet. Here was a man who understood not only the preferences of the poor, but also how to build distribution systems that would reach them in an affordable---and sustainable---way.”
[SD observation: this seems to be characteristic of Acumen Fund. They look at the poor as consumers and ask what they want and how their peers can provide it for them at a low cost in a sustainable business model.]
Pages 238-240 – Incremental housing in Karachi, Pakistan
“Half the people in Karachi, a city of 15 million people, live as squatters, usually paying rent to slumlords. At the same time, due to the growth of the cities, land speculation is rampant, which leaves little that is affordable for low-income and even middle-class people. Even if a poor person has an opportunity to purchase a home, he or she has no access to a mortgage; in fact, many commercial banks view low-income areas as ‘no-go zones.’”
Tasneem Siddiqui’s philosophy: “ ‘We go to the people and live with them, build on what they know, listen to them, and help them do things for themselves’. . . .The concept of incremental housing was based on Tasneem’s knowledge about the buying decisions of very low-income individuals. ‘People in the slums are market oriented, but they usually can’t afford to construct the entire house at once.’ . . . ‘They woud pay $170 up front for the land, and then we required them to live in the courtyard for 10 days. Usually, they would come with some basic covering to protect themselves, but their willingness to sacrifice helped us differentiate the real prospective home owners from the speculators who wanted to buy and then flip the houses. . . .in addition to being transparent with the rules, our manager has lived here among the people since the beginning. He helps resolve disputes 24 hours a day. We listen to the people and then let them choose the kind of house they want to build. The poor want a roof over their head, a feeling of safety, services they can rely on. We didn’t bring it overnight---it is why we call this incremental housing.’ . . .Today more than 20,000 live in Khuda-Ki-Busti, and dozens of viable businesses have sprung up to serve it. Churches coexist with mosques and a Hindu temple. A bus service runs into town regularly at an affordable price.”
Pages 240-241 - Corruption
So Acumen Fund lent Tasneem’s company money to expand. He hired Jawad to start the new housing development. Jawad paid for the land but couldn’t get the title registered for over a year because Acumen forbids bribes (“speed money”).
“In most countries, there is big corruption at the highest levels, and then there is the often more destabilizing petty corruption that becomes so common that people experience it simply as the way things work. Petty corruption---paying someone to get your child into school or to avoid a speeding ticket---is ultimately deeply corrosive. . . .it is only when some people refuse to play that the game has any chance of changing.”
Page 254 – Global food crises
“Of course, the more we learn about how to sell productive inputs to farmers, the more we learn about the distortions the aid industry can foist upon those same farmers. When there is a crisis in a place like Kenya or southern Pakistan, the United States and Europe will send ‘free food’ that is purchased at highly subsidized prices from their own farmers rather than sending the money to purchase the produce of local farmers. The world has a long way to go, but these relatively small experiments are teaching us how much is possible if we build trust, show the farmers what is possible, provide them with technical assistance, and connect them to the markets.”
Pages 259 – 262 – Mosquito nets
“Malaria is one of the world’s biggest killers, taking the lives of between 1 and 2 million people every year. About 90 percent of these cases are in Africa, and three-quarters of those who contract malaria are women and children. . . .In 2002 we were approached by representatives of a collaboration of UNICEF, Sumitomo Chemical, and Exxon Mobil to see if we might participate in an effort to manufacture a long-lasting, insecticide-treated bed net in Africa for distribution there. . . .After reviewing a number of different businesses,, Anju Shah of A to Z Textiles emerged as the best entrepreneur on whom to take a risk. Based in Arusha, Tanzania, the family-owned company had already operated successfully for a quarter century in a tough business environment. . . .By 2008. . . more than 7,000 women were working with A to Z. Assuming that each job helps support five people, that means more than 35,000 individuals are directly touched by production of a much-needed item for the health of the poor. . . .Anuj’s third-generation company now supplies 16 million nets a year. . .While Acumen Fund believes in the goal of promoting universal access to life-saving bed nets, we are also committed to experimenting with various private sector approaches to distribution. We and A to Z agreed to try selling nets at different price points, not only to low-income consumers but to companies that had an economic incentive to protect their workers from the disease. Innovation requires experimentation; no one has the answers for solving poverty yet. . . .A to Z agreed to experiment with building a small sales force of women to see what would happen if they tried selling bed nets door-to-door. The first approach was to build a sort of Tupperware model whereby individual women would sell nets door-to-door and at small house parties. In the first month, three of the women absconded with 17 nets. Having anticipated some amount of stealing early on in the process, A to Z had required the women to leave behind a minimum of two guarantors at the factory, each of whom would be responsible to make full payment for any missing or stolen nets. They held to their policy and no nets were taken after that. One of the most charismatic saleswomen demonstrated how she pitched the sale of nets to her neighbors at a trial house party. The typical public health language of ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ was nowhere in evidence. ‘You put the bed net on your floor, . . .and all the bugs go away, not just the mosquitoes. Can you imagine? You can sleep the whole night long because there is no buzzing in your ears---and your children will do better in school because they won’t be so tired. The color is beautiful, and you can hang the nets in your windows so that your neighbors know how much you care about your family.’ Almost as an afterthought she mentioned that the bed nets would protect the children from malaria. Beauty, vanity, status, and comfort: These are the levers that are pulled the world over as we make our decisions. The rich hold no monopoly on any of it. But we’re a long way from integrating the way people actually make decisions into public policy instead of how we think they should make them.”
Page 263 – Free vs. selling
“Today’s media are highlighting a major debate between those who think that everyone in Africa shold be given a free bed net to protect him or her from malaria and those who believe that the bed nets should be sold at an affordable price. The free-nets side cites fast coverage ratios and immediate reductions in malaria. And it’s true: Malaria rates fall dramatically when an entire village is given free nets. Social marketing advocates---those who believe that nets shold be sold---argue that giveaway programs typically result in quick fixes that don’t last and point to evidence in Ethiopia and other countries where, only a few years after net distribution, actual usage rates fell precipitously. This, too, is true. So often we ask ourselves the wrong question. When it comes to a disease like malaria, th question should not be whether bed nets are sold or given away free. Both distribution methods have their place in a broader attack on the disease. . . .It’s not ‘either-or’ but rather ‘both-and.’ We have to be careful as well that the world’s focus on bed nets doesn’t hold back other potential innovations. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has put hundreds of millions of dollars into researching a malaria vaccine, and efforts are under way to create a line of house paints that kill mosquitoes but are safe for humans to touch.”
Page 267 – Water
One experiment in India established water purification plants where people could buy safe drinking water. The company was selling the water in 15-liter sanitary plastic containers but some customers were pouring the water into contaminated clay pitchers. Why? Because clay has evaporative qualities that make it serve as a natural cooler for the water. So rather than try to convince the people to use plastic, a company is now focused on designing clay containers that could be sanitized regularly. Behavioral change is much slower than technological change.
Page 274 –Summary
“The psychology of poverty is so complex. It is so often the people who know the greatest suffering---the poor and most vulnerable---who are the most resilient, the ones able to derive happiness and shared joy from the simplest pleasures. . . That same resilience, however, can manifest itself in passivity, fatalism, and a resignation to the difficulties of life that allows injustice and inequity to strengthen, grow, and solidify into a system where people forget to question until an event or series of events awakens the next generation.” The author writes about her “resolve to find more solutions that started with the poor as customers. At the end of the day, finding the answers to a fractured world must begin with encouraging and honoring the discipline and ambition, hard work and generosity of so many billions who want the same things we all do. There is a powerful role both for the market and for philanthropy to play in creating this future. Philanthropy alone lacks the feedback mechanisms of markets, which are the best listening devices we have; and yet markets alone too easily leave the most vulnerable behind.”
“Jacqueline Novogratz is founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture capital firm for the poor that invests in sustainable enterprises.”
This book is the author’s NY Times bestselling memoir. If you are interested in the memoir, read the whole book. If you are just interested in the best ideas/observations in the book, here they are.
A microlending program in pre-genocide Rwanda financed a women’s business that the author calls “The Blue Bakery.”
Pages 79-84: The bakery produced fried dough in various shapes and the same women who made the doughnuts then took them out to sell in various offices and businesses in Kigali (the capital of Rwanda). At first there was no real system for keeping up with how many doughnuts each woman took out, so some women took out more than they reported and kept part of the money (or maybe ate the doughnuts). After feeling hurt and unappreciated, Novogratz realized that the women had no incentive to be honest, so she redid the accounting system to provide such incentives. [SD observation: If Wall Street bankers don’t hesitate to skim off other people’s money why should poor women in Africa?] Next Novogratz tried to train the women in sales techniques: look customers in the eye and invite them to buy. Speak to other passengers on the bus and ask them to buy. The women refused. Turns out this would be considered impolite. Then Novogratz tried competition among the saleswomen to see who could sell the most. No one would participate. But slowly the business grew. Then one day “I received a call from a friend who had expected the women to deliver an order of goods for a party; nothing had arrived. . . .Finally, we learned they’d all gone to the funeral of a friend thinking the order for baked goods could wait. . . .The next morning we asked the women who had attended the funeral what had happened. They answered very matter-of-factly that their friend had died and the lady with the party would have to wait. . . .” [SD: It takes a very long time for poor women to see a business as belonging to them and dependent on their efforts, their ability to keep promises, and their integrity. All the obstacles Novogratz faced were perfectly understandable and probably unavoidable. But the women’s own culture and values had to be taken into account and ways found to make “good business practices” work within their circumstances.]
Pages 132 – 134 – Haddy’s fertilizer business in the Gambia
“In one of the villages we met Haddy, an unforgettable, irrepressible fertilizer retailer probably in her forties, who knew the local farmers and understood the psychology of selling.” By this time Novogratz was working for the World Bank. She writes, “I suggested that my colleagues at the Bank wanted her opinion on their proposal to provide loans for inputs like fertilizer through large development and commercial banks.”
“ ‘Nonsense!’ Haddy explained. ‘First, we are living too far away from the banks, and second, we don’t trust them. Further, most banks don’t want to deal with farmers like us. They just want the big ones. The small farmers come to a retailer like me and borrow the money they need to plant and fertilize the harvest. You see, they have no cash and so they rely on credit until the harvest comes, and then they pay back.’
‘But how can you count on farmers repaying?’ I asked.
‘Because this is a small area and we know everyone. If I had more cash myself, then I could lend even more to the farmers. My credit to you would be strong. So you see? You have to bet only on Haddy and I will take the responsibility for making sure the others repay me so that I can repay you.’
‘How do we know you are a fair seller?’ I asked.
‘You must ask the farmers and see what they say,’ she responded. ‘I want to help change my country and I will serve it better than those big banks.’”
Novogratz was convinced. She took the idea to the woman who headed the committee. The woman objected to lending to Haddy because she did not fall into the category of “the poorest of the poor.”
“I explained that we were attempting to promote the private sector in a way that reached poor farmers. If we could find a way to help the market actually work for poor farmers, then they could make their own investments in things like fertilizers and seeds and repay when the harvest came in. They wouldn’t be waiting for an agency to give them things. I talked about needing a mind-set beyond charity to reach poor farmers: The farmers themselves were market-driven and deserved solutions that could help them sustain themselves for years.”
The woman was interested only in giving money to the poorest of the poor, not lending money to women like Haddy who already had successful businesses. Novogratz pointed out that the give-away programs had failed after 20 years of pouring money into them. She was told “You don’t know this country.” The meeting was over.
Pages 157-158 – Who gets to lead?
Novogratz is now working for a program called Next Generation Leaders funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
“In the first year I allowed NGL’s group of 24 fellows to be held hostage in their discussions by a small group of activists who verbally attacked any thoughts with which they disagreed. Though extremely talented in their fields, those individuals rarely offered constructive solutions to problems and , ironically, represented exactly what we were trying to avoid in the program: leaders who were more comfortable flinging opinions than basing arguments on principles and facts.
My biggest flaw was that I was not being true to myself. In that first year, a young African American man intimidated me in front of the fellows by claiming I could never lead the group properly because I was white, privileged, and connected to the Rockefeller establishment, which he believed had done great damage to the world. Instead of confronting him directly, I stared like a deer caught in the headlights and tried defending myself as someone who had worked hard to cover university tuition and make my way in the world. . . .It took months for me to understand that my biggest error had been trying to defend an implausible position. . . .The question wasn’t whether I was privileged, but whether that privilege disqualified me from effectively running the program. I had responded to the wrong attack---and had done so lamely, at that. Instead, I should have asked the young man why he chose to stay in a program when he disdained its host, the Rockefeller Foundation. . . In not confronting him, I let down the program and myself.”
Pages 160-161 – Mississippi catfish factory
“At the catfish factories, we saw firsthand what an unfettered private sector can do to poor people in the name of job creation: All but one of the 400 catfish processing factories in the Mississippi Delta were owned by white men, and 99 percent of the workers were black women. The women earned minimum wage and typically stood in ice-cold, bloody water for hours cutting fillets of catfish, with few breaks for lunch or the bathroom.” Novogratz and a colleague visited a factory where they talked with a woman supervisor. After much suspicion, the woman warmed up at little. “ ‘Things are a lot better now,’ she told us after a minute or two of silence. ‘Why?’ Lisa asked. ‘The line is safer now, we can take breaks, and our hours are not as bad as they used to be. People aren’t getting hurt as much.’ ‘What happened?’ Lisa pushed. Leaning over the table, she looked at us and with her index finger traced a big, invisible U for ‘union.’ In whispers, she talked about how young Easterners had come down to Mississippi to discuss the power of unions. The workers had risked everything, she said. ‘Some of us were fired and, you know, we didn’t have no cushion to keep us eating. But we helped each other, and we kept at it, and we made it.’ . . . The Delta also reminded me of how easily capitalism can be manipulated to oppress the most vulnerable. Good public policy must accompany market-oriented solutions that are undergirded with an imperative of moral leadership. We need to ask more questions about who is awarded public contracts, who gains, who loses, and whether or not our public funds are doing the most possible for the most people rather than benefiting just a few.”
Page 229 – Patient capital
Novogratz founded Acumen Fund. “Our investment style was focused on what we termed patient capital---not traditional charity, not traditional business investment, but something in-between. Patient capital is money invested over a longer period of time with the acknowledgment that returns might be below market, but with a wide range of management support services to nurture the company [being invested in] to liftoff and beyond. If it were easy to start a business serving the poor, patient capital would not be necessary. It’s not easy. Social entrepreneurs focused on serving low-income markets work against all odds of success, facing enormous individual and institutional challenges. The only chance to overcome these hurdles is to combine an extraordinary entrepreneur with the kind of support that neither traditional investors nor charities can provide.”
Pages 230-231 – Drishtee telecommunications company in India – Satyan Mishra
Mishra is described as “a visionary entrepreneur who was focused first and foremonst on supporting the poor by building a large-scale information distribution system. . . .His vision was to establish a network of tele-kiosks, one in each of India’s 650,000 villages. A tele-kiosk, he explained, was a small store where a local entrepreneur would set himself up with a computer, a phone, and a camera. He would sell a range of services, from computer training classes to international calls to taking family photographs and sending them to relatives over the Internet. Here was a man who understood not only the preferences of the poor, but also how to build distribution systems that would reach them in an affordable---and sustainable---way.”
[SD observation: this seems to be characteristic of Acumen Fund. They look at the poor as consumers and ask what they want and how their peers can provide it for them at a low cost in a sustainable business model.]
Pages 238-240 – Incremental housing in Karachi, Pakistan
“Half the people in Karachi, a city of 15 million people, live as squatters, usually paying rent to slumlords. At the same time, due to the growth of the cities, land speculation is rampant, which leaves little that is affordable for low-income and even middle-class people. Even if a poor person has an opportunity to purchase a home, he or she has no access to a mortgage; in fact, many commercial banks view low-income areas as ‘no-go zones.’”
Tasneem Siddiqui’s philosophy: “ ‘We go to the people and live with them, build on what they know, listen to them, and help them do things for themselves’. . . .The concept of incremental housing was based on Tasneem’s knowledge about the buying decisions of very low-income individuals. ‘People in the slums are market oriented, but they usually can’t afford to construct the entire house at once.’ . . . ‘They woud pay $170 up front for the land, and then we required them to live in the courtyard for 10 days. Usually, they would come with some basic covering to protect themselves, but their willingness to sacrifice helped us differentiate the real prospective home owners from the speculators who wanted to buy and then flip the houses. . . .in addition to being transparent with the rules, our manager has lived here among the people since the beginning. He helps resolve disputes 24 hours a day. We listen to the people and then let them choose the kind of house they want to build. The poor want a roof over their head, a feeling of safety, services they can rely on. We didn’t bring it overnight---it is why we call this incremental housing.’ . . .Today more than 20,000 live in Khuda-Ki-Busti, and dozens of viable businesses have sprung up to serve it. Churches coexist with mosques and a Hindu temple. A bus service runs into town regularly at an affordable price.”
Pages 240-241 - Corruption
So Acumen Fund lent Tasneem’s company money to expand. He hired Jawad to start the new housing development. Jawad paid for the land but couldn’t get the title registered for over a year because Acumen forbids bribes (“speed money”).
“In most countries, there is big corruption at the highest levels, and then there is the often more destabilizing petty corruption that becomes so common that people experience it simply as the way things work. Petty corruption---paying someone to get your child into school or to avoid a speeding ticket---is ultimately deeply corrosive. . . .it is only when some people refuse to play that the game has any chance of changing.”
Page 254 – Global food crises
“Of course, the more we learn about how to sell productive inputs to farmers, the more we learn about the distortions the aid industry can foist upon those same farmers. When there is a crisis in a place like Kenya or southern Pakistan, the United States and Europe will send ‘free food’ that is purchased at highly subsidized prices from their own farmers rather than sending the money to purchase the produce of local farmers. The world has a long way to go, but these relatively small experiments are teaching us how much is possible if we build trust, show the farmers what is possible, provide them with technical assistance, and connect them to the markets.”
Pages 259 – 262 – Mosquito nets
“Malaria is one of the world’s biggest killers, taking the lives of between 1 and 2 million people every year. About 90 percent of these cases are in Africa, and three-quarters of those who contract malaria are women and children. . . .In 2002 we were approached by representatives of a collaboration of UNICEF, Sumitomo Chemical, and Exxon Mobil to see if we might participate in an effort to manufacture a long-lasting, insecticide-treated bed net in Africa for distribution there. . . .After reviewing a number of different businesses,, Anju Shah of A to Z Textiles emerged as the best entrepreneur on whom to take a risk. Based in Arusha, Tanzania, the family-owned company had already operated successfully for a quarter century in a tough business environment. . . .By 2008. . . more than 7,000 women were working with A to Z. Assuming that each job helps support five people, that means more than 35,000 individuals are directly touched by production of a much-needed item for the health of the poor. . . .Anuj’s third-generation company now supplies 16 million nets a year. . .While Acumen Fund believes in the goal of promoting universal access to life-saving bed nets, we are also committed to experimenting with various private sector approaches to distribution. We and A to Z agreed to try selling nets at different price points, not only to low-income consumers but to companies that had an economic incentive to protect their workers from the disease. Innovation requires experimentation; no one has the answers for solving poverty yet. . . .A to Z agreed to experiment with building a small sales force of women to see what would happen if they tried selling bed nets door-to-door. The first approach was to build a sort of Tupperware model whereby individual women would sell nets door-to-door and at small house parties. In the first month, three of the women absconded with 17 nets. Having anticipated some amount of stealing early on in the process, A to Z had required the women to leave behind a minimum of two guarantors at the factory, each of whom would be responsible to make full payment for any missing or stolen nets. They held to their policy and no nets were taken after that. One of the most charismatic saleswomen demonstrated how she pitched the sale of nets to her neighbors at a trial house party. The typical public health language of ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ was nowhere in evidence. ‘You put the bed net on your floor, . . .and all the bugs go away, not just the mosquitoes. Can you imagine? You can sleep the whole night long because there is no buzzing in your ears---and your children will do better in school because they won’t be so tired. The color is beautiful, and you can hang the nets in your windows so that your neighbors know how much you care about your family.’ Almost as an afterthought she mentioned that the bed nets would protect the children from malaria. Beauty, vanity, status, and comfort: These are the levers that are pulled the world over as we make our decisions. The rich hold no monopoly on any of it. But we’re a long way from integrating the way people actually make decisions into public policy instead of how we think they should make them.”
Page 263 – Free vs. selling
“Today’s media are highlighting a major debate between those who think that everyone in Africa shold be given a free bed net to protect him or her from malaria and those who believe that the bed nets should be sold at an affordable price. The free-nets side cites fast coverage ratios and immediate reductions in malaria. And it’s true: Malaria rates fall dramatically when an entire village is given free nets. Social marketing advocates---those who believe that nets shold be sold---argue that giveaway programs typically result in quick fixes that don’t last and point to evidence in Ethiopia and other countries where, only a few years after net distribution, actual usage rates fell precipitously. This, too, is true. So often we ask ourselves the wrong question. When it comes to a disease like malaria, th question should not be whether bed nets are sold or given away free. Both distribution methods have their place in a broader attack on the disease. . . .It’s not ‘either-or’ but rather ‘both-and.’ We have to be careful as well that the world’s focus on bed nets doesn’t hold back other potential innovations. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has put hundreds of millions of dollars into researching a malaria vaccine, and efforts are under way to create a line of house paints that kill mosquitoes but are safe for humans to touch.”
Page 267 – Water
One experiment in India established water purification plants where people could buy safe drinking water. The company was selling the water in 15-liter sanitary plastic containers but some customers were pouring the water into contaminated clay pitchers. Why? Because clay has evaporative qualities that make it serve as a natural cooler for the water. So rather than try to convince the people to use plastic, a company is now focused on designing clay containers that could be sanitized regularly. Behavioral change is much slower than technological change.
Page 274 –Summary
“The psychology of poverty is so complex. It is so often the people who know the greatest suffering---the poor and most vulnerable---who are the most resilient, the ones able to derive happiness and shared joy from the simplest pleasures. . . That same resilience, however, can manifest itself in passivity, fatalism, and a resignation to the difficulties of life that allows injustice and inequity to strengthen, grow, and solidify into a system where people forget to question until an event or series of events awakens the next generation.” The author writes about her “resolve to find more solutions that started with the poor as customers. At the end of the day, finding the answers to a fractured world must begin with encouraging and honoring the discipline and ambition, hard work and generosity of so many billions who want the same things we all do. There is a powerful role both for the market and for philanthropy to play in creating this future. Philanthropy alone lacks the feedback mechanisms of markets, which are the best listening devices we have; and yet markets alone too easily leave the most vulnerable behind.”
Miracles: God’s Presence and Power in Creation by Luke Timothy Johnson (Louisville: WJK, 2018).
Part of the Interpretation series called Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church, this volume offers a way into a question that every post-Enlightenment Christian faces whenever she offers a prayer of petition or intercession: What is God’s relationship with the world God created? Does God act in creation? Johnson’s response is an unequivocal “yes” and he offers this study because “intellectual integrity demands taking on modernity’s epistemological and cultural challenge to miracles, not least because may Christians today find their own faith compromised by a sort of double-mindedness” (xi).
Part One: Framing the Discussion is made up of three chapters. The first defines miracles as “experiences that could not be ascribed to merely human agency” and details the prevalence of the miraculous not only in the Bible but throughout the history of the church to the present. Johnson then summarizes the efforts of Enlightenment thinkers, the “new atheists,” to show the impossibility of miracles and the likes of John Spong to celebrate a version of Christian faith that does not need them.
Chapter 2 makes explicit the source of the double-mindedness of educated Christians: either miracles continue to occur in the present (as many ordinary Christians attest) or miracles never occurred at all, including the central claims of the creeds: incarnation and resurrection. Dispensationalism, of course, attempted to deal with this problem, but Johnson does not discuss Darby and Scofield and their followers because he is writing for readers who recognize that a problem does exist. The problem is evident every Sunday morning in congregations that celebrate the Biblical witness in worship and deconstruct it in adult education discussions. Johnson is by no means hostile to critical thinking; his program is to offer different categories than the Enlightenment’s definition of a miracle as “the breaking of the established laws of nature by a divine agency”(27). Since there are no immutable laws of nature, merely human observations about frequency (33), and since “developments in theoretical physics, . . . astrophysics and geophysics have likewise shattered the Enlightenment image of nature as a well-ordered and self-contained system” (39), new ways of thinking would seem to be in order.
In “Reframing the Discussion,” Johnson completes Part One with the suggestion that a way forward would be to imagine the world that Scripture imagines. And of course, Scripture counts as knowledge not merely material phenomena that can be measured and explained. For the writers of Scripture, imagination, religious experience, intuition, art, and poetry are all forms of knowledge through which God is revealed (46). Scripture then might be read “not as an inadequate collection of historical sources that poorly describe reality, but as a set of witnesses that powerfully prescribe reality . . .an imaginative construction of a world within which humans can choose to live, a world they can embody through practices consistent with that vision” (51).
The primary category Johnson uses is that of creation as an ongoing interaction of God with all that is; creation is not a past event but a present experience. “Because it so imagines the world, Scripture also reveals this world as permeable to and penetrated by that divine power (56).”
This third chapter of Part One (45-75) is one of the richest in the book and deserves a close reading and re-reading.
Part Two applies the recommended way of reading to the Old Testament and Part three uses the same lens to understand the writings of the New Testament, focusing intently, but not exclusively, on the references to incarnation, miracle, and resurrection. These two sections are too extensive and dense to be summarized here, but it is clear that Johnson has found a way to read Scripture on its own terms and make sense of it in the context of twenty-first-century human life and experience.
Part Four consists of one chapter, ‘Recovering a Sense of Wonder.” Here Johnson suggests implications for the life of communities of faith as they follow the lead of Scripture in constructing “a symbolic world within which miracles make sense” (278). This is not the work of individuals, but of communities dedicated to “a view of the world that is so at odds with the secular vision within which Christians, if they are not to withdraw from society altogether, must spend their days. The effort requires above all, embodied practices that express the alternative vision of the world and give it empirical expression” (278).
Johnson then discusses teaching (direct engagement with the physical world, connecting with human experience, celebrating the truth of myth), preaching, prayer, and pastoral care and counseling. Perhaps the most challenging suggestion in this final chapter is that Christian communities should seek out and pay attention to each other’s stories of encounters with God. “Testifying” must be embraced by those who have regarded themselves as too sophisticated to entertain the practice. Johnson’s final paragraph is worth quoting in full:
For believers, the truth is that the living God will continue to manifest his
presence and power within creation. The issue is not that truth. The issue
is whether humans will have ears to hear the word that God seeks to express,
or eyes to perceive the signs and wonders that God uses to draw attention
to the truth about humans and their world. The church ought to be the place
in the world where God’s continuing self-revelation is discerned, celebrated,
and embodied. But if the church’s members, and above all its ministers,
share the secular worldview that excludes God from consideration, or at
best are double-minded, trying to fit Christianity into a frame that the gospel
itself refutes, then the church will be less able to be church. The church’s
greatest gift and its mightiest challenge is to declare God’s self-revelation
within the world that God brings into being, the One from whom creation
derives, and the One to whom creation is ordered. Failure at this is utter
failure” (300).
Part One: Framing the Discussion is made up of three chapters. The first defines miracles as “experiences that could not be ascribed to merely human agency” and details the prevalence of the miraculous not only in the Bible but throughout the history of the church to the present. Johnson then summarizes the efforts of Enlightenment thinkers, the “new atheists,” to show the impossibility of miracles and the likes of John Spong to celebrate a version of Christian faith that does not need them.
Chapter 2 makes explicit the source of the double-mindedness of educated Christians: either miracles continue to occur in the present (as many ordinary Christians attest) or miracles never occurred at all, including the central claims of the creeds: incarnation and resurrection. Dispensationalism, of course, attempted to deal with this problem, but Johnson does not discuss Darby and Scofield and their followers because he is writing for readers who recognize that a problem does exist. The problem is evident every Sunday morning in congregations that celebrate the Biblical witness in worship and deconstruct it in adult education discussions. Johnson is by no means hostile to critical thinking; his program is to offer different categories than the Enlightenment’s definition of a miracle as “the breaking of the established laws of nature by a divine agency”(27). Since there are no immutable laws of nature, merely human observations about frequency (33), and since “developments in theoretical physics, . . . astrophysics and geophysics have likewise shattered the Enlightenment image of nature as a well-ordered and self-contained system” (39), new ways of thinking would seem to be in order.
In “Reframing the Discussion,” Johnson completes Part One with the suggestion that a way forward would be to imagine the world that Scripture imagines. And of course, Scripture counts as knowledge not merely material phenomena that can be measured and explained. For the writers of Scripture, imagination, religious experience, intuition, art, and poetry are all forms of knowledge through which God is revealed (46). Scripture then might be read “not as an inadequate collection of historical sources that poorly describe reality, but as a set of witnesses that powerfully prescribe reality . . .an imaginative construction of a world within which humans can choose to live, a world they can embody through practices consistent with that vision” (51).
The primary category Johnson uses is that of creation as an ongoing interaction of God with all that is; creation is not a past event but a present experience. “Because it so imagines the world, Scripture also reveals this world as permeable to and penetrated by that divine power (56).”
This third chapter of Part One (45-75) is one of the richest in the book and deserves a close reading and re-reading.
Part Two applies the recommended way of reading to the Old Testament and Part three uses the same lens to understand the writings of the New Testament, focusing intently, but not exclusively, on the references to incarnation, miracle, and resurrection. These two sections are too extensive and dense to be summarized here, but it is clear that Johnson has found a way to read Scripture on its own terms and make sense of it in the context of twenty-first-century human life and experience.
Part Four consists of one chapter, ‘Recovering a Sense of Wonder.” Here Johnson suggests implications for the life of communities of faith as they follow the lead of Scripture in constructing “a symbolic world within which miracles make sense” (278). This is not the work of individuals, but of communities dedicated to “a view of the world that is so at odds with the secular vision within which Christians, if they are not to withdraw from society altogether, must spend their days. The effort requires above all, embodied practices that express the alternative vision of the world and give it empirical expression” (278).
Johnson then discusses teaching (direct engagement with the physical world, connecting with human experience, celebrating the truth of myth), preaching, prayer, and pastoral care and counseling. Perhaps the most challenging suggestion in this final chapter is that Christian communities should seek out and pay attention to each other’s stories of encounters with God. “Testifying” must be embraced by those who have regarded themselves as too sophisticated to entertain the practice. Johnson’s final paragraph is worth quoting in full:
For believers, the truth is that the living God will continue to manifest his
presence and power within creation. The issue is not that truth. The issue
is whether humans will have ears to hear the word that God seeks to express,
or eyes to perceive the signs and wonders that God uses to draw attention
to the truth about humans and their world. The church ought to be the place
in the world where God’s continuing self-revelation is discerned, celebrated,
and embodied. But if the church’s members, and above all its ministers,
share the secular worldview that excludes God from consideration, or at
best are double-minded, trying to fit Christianity into a frame that the gospel
itself refutes, then the church will be less able to be church. The church’s
greatest gift and its mightiest challenge is to declare God’s self-revelation
within the world that God brings into being, the One from whom creation
derives, and the One to whom creation is ordered. Failure at this is utter
failure” (300).
Joy Jordan-Lake, A Tangled Mercy. A Novel. Seattle: Lake Union Publishing, November 1, 2017.
Jordan-Lake's new novel is a gripping story of relationships, loyalty, betrayal, terror and triumph of spirit set in Charleston, South Carolina. The characters are two groups of Charlestonians. One set of characters are those involved in and touched by the slave rebellion planned by Denmark Vesey in 1822 but aborted when terrified associates leaked the plan to the white men of the city. The other group of characters lived in the Charleston of 2015, when the city was rocked by the massacre of nine members of a Bible study by a white nationalist attempting, by his own account, to start a race war.
These two groups of characters are connected by a web of relationships and puzzling questions that keep the reader intrigued and involved as the stories unfold.
This unfolding is accomplished by chapters that alternate between 1822 and 2015, moving both stories along toward their heartbreaking and heart-lifting conclusions, both revolving around Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the mother church of the AME denomination.
Jordan-Lake is a master of her craft. The plots and sub-plots are intricate, but not at all confusing and the "aha" moments come at just the right times in the reader's experience. There is not a cardboard character in the whole novel; the Harvard graduate student is admirable and neurotic; the child who is necessary to bridge the gap between adults inclined to mistrust each other is not merely a gregarious imp, but a math genius who deals with his anxiety by solving his Rubik's cube; the elegant elderly Southern lady dislikes mint juleps and is more interested in truth than propriety.
And thank the muses, we are not subjected to worn-out language (I will burn the next book containing the phrase "pre-dawn darkness"). Instead one comes upon this:
"Daniel laughed. Not much more than a chipped piece of a chuckle, really, like it rumbled up from somewhere deep down inside and rusted to stiff but somehow still lurched its way up and out."
And this:
"A breeze off the marsh jostled a line of palmettos and set them to rattling fronds like flimsy wood sabers . . . The sun would soon be chinning up over the edge of the marsh, and the temperature with it."
Sue Monk Kidd's The Invention of Wings brought nineteenth-century Charleston to the attention of many readers for the first time. Joy Jordan-Lake's A Tangled Mercy far surpasses Kidd's novel in research, craft, suspense and emotional involvement.
READ THIS BOOK!
Jordan-Lake's new novel is a gripping story of relationships, loyalty, betrayal, terror and triumph of spirit set in Charleston, South Carolina. The characters are two groups of Charlestonians. One set of characters are those involved in and touched by the slave rebellion planned by Denmark Vesey in 1822 but aborted when terrified associates leaked the plan to the white men of the city. The other group of characters lived in the Charleston of 2015, when the city was rocked by the massacre of nine members of a Bible study by a white nationalist attempting, by his own account, to start a race war.
These two groups of characters are connected by a web of relationships and puzzling questions that keep the reader intrigued and involved as the stories unfold.
This unfolding is accomplished by chapters that alternate between 1822 and 2015, moving both stories along toward their heartbreaking and heart-lifting conclusions, both revolving around Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the mother church of the AME denomination.
Jordan-Lake is a master of her craft. The plots and sub-plots are intricate, but not at all confusing and the "aha" moments come at just the right times in the reader's experience. There is not a cardboard character in the whole novel; the Harvard graduate student is admirable and neurotic; the child who is necessary to bridge the gap between adults inclined to mistrust each other is not merely a gregarious imp, but a math genius who deals with his anxiety by solving his Rubik's cube; the elegant elderly Southern lady dislikes mint juleps and is more interested in truth than propriety.
And thank the muses, we are not subjected to worn-out language (I will burn the next book containing the phrase "pre-dawn darkness"). Instead one comes upon this:
"Daniel laughed. Not much more than a chipped piece of a chuckle, really, like it rumbled up from somewhere deep down inside and rusted to stiff but somehow still lurched its way up and out."
And this:
"A breeze off the marsh jostled a line of palmettos and set them to rattling fronds like flimsy wood sabers . . . The sun would soon be chinning up over the edge of the marsh, and the temperature with it."
Sue Monk Kidd's The Invention of Wings brought nineteenth-century Charleston to the attention of many readers for the first time. Joy Jordan-Lake's A Tangled Mercy far surpasses Kidd's novel in research, craft, suspense and emotional involvement.
READ THIS BOOK!
Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Bloomsbury USA, 2015.
Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society. Harper Perennial, 2014.
Hari is a British journalist and researcher who works from interviews, scientific papers, and the previously unpublished papers of Billie Holiday and Harry J. Anslinger.
Hart is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia University. He is also a Research Scientist in the Division of Substance Abuse at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. His book is a combination of reports on his and others' research and a memoir of his childhood growing up in African-American neighborhoods and housing projects of Miami.
The following is a list of documented claims in these two books. The reader is referred to the books themselves for the details.
Carl Hart, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society. Harper Perennial, 2014.
Hari is a British journalist and researcher who works from interviews, scientific papers, and the previously unpublished papers of Billie Holiday and Harry J. Anslinger.
Hart is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia University. He is also a Research Scientist in the Division of Substance Abuse at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. His book is a combination of reports on his and others' research and a memoir of his childhood growing up in African-American neighborhoods and housing projects of Miami.
The following is a list of documented claims in these two books. The reader is referred to the books themselves for the details.
- Prior to 1914 narcotics and opiates that are now illegal were readily available in American pharmacies without a prescription.
- The criminalization of these drugs was promoted by Harry J. Anslinger after it became apparent that the repeal of prohibition would leave previously busy federal agencies without funds or personnel.
- Anslinger tied his crusade against opiates and marijuana to racial fears with tales of Blacks and Mexicans who supposedly had been driven insane by drugs and who had committed unspeakable acts of violence. He also encouraged law enforcement officials to claim that narcotics made Black men impervious to bullets, resulting in police requests for higher caliber weapons.
- When scientists challenged Anslinger's claims about the power of illegal drugs to produce immediate chemical addiction and violent behavior, he ignored the scientists and, in some cases, slandered and silenced them.
- When prominent white politicians and actors were reported to Anslinger as drug addicts he protected them. He personally supplied Senator Joseph McCarthy with the heroin to which McCarthy was addicted.
- In his memoir, Hart frankly details his criminal behavior on the streets of Miami and shows that much theft by poor youth was and is driven by the perceived injustice of wealth inequality and not by addicts seeking to buy drugs. He and his friends frequently stole but none of them were addicted. They partied with marijuana and cocaine but did not become addicted.
- In fact, Hart claims that only 10% of the users of illegal drugs are addicts. The rest are the equivalent of drinkers who drink heavily at parties but are not addicted to alcohol and do not need to steal to acquire their drug of choice.
- Both alcohol and tobacco are inherently more harmful to the body than most illegal drugs, if the drugs are taken in pharmaceutically pure form.
- The cause of the crimes associated with illegal drugs is the illegality itself. If drugs were controlled and regulated like tobacco and alcohol, most of the criminal activity would cease. This is illustrated by the history of prohibition. When prohibition was repealed, drinking went up slightly, though alcoholism soon leveled off. Crime associated with alcohol soon became negligible.
- Research has demonstrated that it is not the case that (for example) crack addicts must have more and stronger doses of the drug because of its chemical effects on the brain. In clinical trials some addicts would ask for only one "hit" and then later in the day take a cash payment instead of another dose, although they were hospitalized and unable to spend the money for street drugs.
- Street addicts must buy enough of a drug for themselves, then "cut" the rest with other substances and sell the result to raise money for the next day's "hit." It is these adulterated drugs that destroy the health of the users. Pharmaceutical grade drugs cause only the psychological effect, not other health problems unless previous conditions exist.
- Addiction is not primarily chemical but psychological. People use alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs to numb psychological or physical pain or, in the case of tobacco, to produce a calming effect. People who are willing and able to deal with their emotional pain in more healthy ways do not become addicts (except to nicotine which is extremely chemically addictive).
- Experiments in two drug-infested areas of England showed that heroin addicts who received a small dose of pharmaceutical grade drug in the morning were soon able to find and retain jobs, exactly like high-functioning alcoholics.
- The sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine (used and sold by African Americans) are multiple times more severe than sentencing guidelines for powder cocaine (used primarily by upper-class whites) even though the chemical properties are exactly the same for the two forms of cocaine.
Michael J. Gorman. Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul's Narrative Soteriology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. Kindle Edition.
NB: This is my interpretation of Gorman’s interpretation of Paul’s soteriology.
There are two aspects to the human predicament: (1) humans are enslaved to a demonic power called Sin, and (2) humans are all idolaters, even the chosen people, whom the Old Testament continually accuses of being unfaithful to the covenant. This failure of covenant faithfulness manifests itself as violations of both “tables” of the Law (Decalogue) - not loving God with the whole self (commandments 1-4) and not loving the neighbor (commandments 5-10).
But there are not two stages to the solution to this problem. Justification (Romans 1-4) and sanctification (Romans 5-8) were not intended by Paul to be separate. There is one solution and that is transformation into the likeness of Christ.
The character and identity of Christ is also the character and identity of the Father and the Spirit. Paul at various places makes this clear. What that means is that the incarnate/crucified/resurrected/glorified Christ is the character of God. It is not that Christ emptied himself of divinity (Phil 2:5-11) but that he manifested and redefined divinity by emptying himself, humbling himself, accepting death on the cross. Thus, the “Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” is just as much cruciform as is the Son; this is also true of the Holy Spirit. So “holiness,” that which sets God apart from false gods and sets God’s people apart from other peoples is participation in the life of the cruciform Trinity.
This means that the self-centered human self has to be “crucified with Christ” (Gal 2, Rom 6) and live “in Christ/God” as Christ/the Spirit live the truly human life also in the believer. This is what it means to live “by the faith(fulness) of Christ,” a Spirit-empowered conformity to the cruciform life.
The individual believer does not experience this alone, but in community. Therefore the Christian community will also be cruciform. This means absorbing, rather than inflicting injustice, embodying non-retaliatory, other-centered love, serving, forgiving, restoring, reconciling, paying special attention to the weaker members of the community and the world outside the community and worshiping the triune God. Gorman writes, “By the power of the Spirit, the church lives a countercultural life of fidelity and love, generosity and justice, purity and promise-keeping, nonviolence and peacemaking. It is, in other words, a Spirit-infused, living exegesis of the cross; or better, a living exegesis of the Crucified, who is the image of God. The church inhabits this triune, cruciform God, who in turn inhabits the church.”
Gorman joins a growing group of students of Paul who are willing to use the term historically used by Eastern Orthodoxy: theosis/divination. In other words, the goal of the Christian life in community is transformation into the likeness of God by participation in the life of God/Christ/Spirit. Thus, Irenaeus: "[T]he Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself."
This is a completely different vision from the typical American evangelical view that humans are forgiven by believing (maybe even trusting in) the doctrine of penal substitution and are subsequently called (but not required) to mature in holiness until they die physically and immediately enjoy the presence of God (“heaven”). This view (or at least the baptist version of it) has no theological need for either baptism or Eucharist, or indeed, for that matter, the church. Gorman joins other readers of Paul in denying that “justification” and “sanctification” are stages of Christian maturity. Rather, “. . . holiness, or sanctification, is not an addition to justification but its actualization.” (Kindle Locations 1083-1084).
NB: This is my interpretation of Gorman’s interpretation of Paul’s soteriology.
There are two aspects to the human predicament: (1) humans are enslaved to a demonic power called Sin, and (2) humans are all idolaters, even the chosen people, whom the Old Testament continually accuses of being unfaithful to the covenant. This failure of covenant faithfulness manifests itself as violations of both “tables” of the Law (Decalogue) - not loving God with the whole self (commandments 1-4) and not loving the neighbor (commandments 5-10).
But there are not two stages to the solution to this problem. Justification (Romans 1-4) and sanctification (Romans 5-8) were not intended by Paul to be separate. There is one solution and that is transformation into the likeness of Christ.
The character and identity of Christ is also the character and identity of the Father and the Spirit. Paul at various places makes this clear. What that means is that the incarnate/crucified/resurrected/glorified Christ is the character of God. It is not that Christ emptied himself of divinity (Phil 2:5-11) but that he manifested and redefined divinity by emptying himself, humbling himself, accepting death on the cross. Thus, the “Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” is just as much cruciform as is the Son; this is also true of the Holy Spirit. So “holiness,” that which sets God apart from false gods and sets God’s people apart from other peoples is participation in the life of the cruciform Trinity.
This means that the self-centered human self has to be “crucified with Christ” (Gal 2, Rom 6) and live “in Christ/God” as Christ/the Spirit live the truly human life also in the believer. This is what it means to live “by the faith(fulness) of Christ,” a Spirit-empowered conformity to the cruciform life.
The individual believer does not experience this alone, but in community. Therefore the Christian community will also be cruciform. This means absorbing, rather than inflicting injustice, embodying non-retaliatory, other-centered love, serving, forgiving, restoring, reconciling, paying special attention to the weaker members of the community and the world outside the community and worshiping the triune God. Gorman writes, “By the power of the Spirit, the church lives a countercultural life of fidelity and love, generosity and justice, purity and promise-keeping, nonviolence and peacemaking. It is, in other words, a Spirit-infused, living exegesis of the cross; or better, a living exegesis of the Crucified, who is the image of God. The church inhabits this triune, cruciform God, who in turn inhabits the church.”
Gorman joins a growing group of students of Paul who are willing to use the term historically used by Eastern Orthodoxy: theosis/divination. In other words, the goal of the Christian life in community is transformation into the likeness of God by participation in the life of God/Christ/Spirit. Thus, Irenaeus: "[T]he Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself."
This is a completely different vision from the typical American evangelical view that humans are forgiven by believing (maybe even trusting in) the doctrine of penal substitution and are subsequently called (but not required) to mature in holiness until they die physically and immediately enjoy the presence of God (“heaven”). This view (or at least the baptist version of it) has no theological need for either baptism or Eucharist, or indeed, for that matter, the church. Gorman joins other readers of Paul in denying that “justification” and “sanctification” are stages of Christian maturity. Rather, “. . . holiness, or sanctification, is not an addition to justification but its actualization.” (Kindle Locations 1083-1084).