Infinite Debt & We Factor

The Lord's prayer in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6:9-13, contains the line: "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors," broadens the picture of the creditor-debtor system. As New Testament scholars have pointed out, Jesus here picks up on Hebrew tradition of "Jubilee (Levi 25)," which periodically would have erased long-standing debts that produced massive inequalities and sometimes reduced people to peonage. In Jesus' time, this was a serious issue, because, urban-based landowners during the 20's of Common Era, accumulated surplus wealth from occasional bumper crops and sought ways to invest. They did this by making loans to peasants, who lived hand to mouth. Upon contracting of loan obligations, a cycle of indebtedness ensued which often lead to default. In addition to the personal and family crises generated by these conditions, there was a more pervasive and enduring form of debt that also preserved and exacerbated unequal conditions among Jesus ‘hearers. As John Dominic Crossan, a New Testament scholar observes, Jesus’ aim in this prayer and throughout much of his ministry was the dismantling of the honor/shame system characteristic of a Galilean society that emerged from unjust economic practices. Forgiveness of debt means the refusal of patronal relations, even to the empire.

The limitation of forgiveness is that it preserves the creditor-debtor relation even in abolishing the debt. What is needed, instead, is liberation or release from debt. The difference between forgiveness and liberation is in the object: forgiveness is of the debt while preserving the creditor-debtor relation; liberation is from the unjust relation itself. Thus, only the latter attacks the imbalance of power that infinitely generates debit.

We see this drive toward liberation in the structure of the Lord’s prayer that situates the one who prays between forgiving and being forgiven. The hierarchical power relations that are structured into the debt system offer both benefit and burden to those whose role is inscribed in the system. To be liberated from the system, one has to be enabled to refuse both. For all of the complications and dangers that it involves, this vision of liberation from debt has the advantage of stressing the agency of indebted persons, who destroy the system of debt insofar as they achieve collective action: a collective refusal and collective construction of an alternative system of non-exploitative social credit. The plural first-person pronoun here is crucial: liberation can only be an act of the "we." The “we” factor in Lord’s prayer points to the communitarian dimension of the people’s resistance.