1. Our idea of development and its contradictions

The economic system operates with nature-like spontaneity, but its determinative elements are not purely natural. It also comprises human laws and agreements, measures which limit and prescribe individual action. And underlying each regulation is a underlying presupposed idea (image) of man.

This underlying idea of humanity gives the deepest and most general determination to the economic system. Man makes such definitions about himself, his self-consciousness of his assets, in every period of history. These evolving definitions are objectified and institutionalized many ways in society. And in that definition are the roots of both the coherence of the social-economic system, as well as its incoherence and contradictions.

For this reason, we should excavate these roots and explore their hidden interdependencies. And to begin, we should examine contradictions in the idea of development.

2. In the view of the Christian Churches

World War II and its aftermath were a very comfortable period for Europe and the Christian churches in regard to the evaluation of current history as a gigantic combat between Good and Evil. Evil, incorporated as we knew it quite certainly, in Fascism generally; and in Hitler personally. We won a total victory exterminating those evils. Consequently, we were the good and just, and by this end we got our deserved verification. World history has not often provided such clear-cut moral justice, truth, seldom so many "world" wars. In earlier national wars, independently from the issue of victory or defeat, each time we stood against evil, of course we were the good ones.

This type of World War II interpretation agrees to a great extent with the general historical concept of the Christian churches in seeing the world as wronged by Evil, against whom God fights to save the Elected People - believers in Christ. All events of the world are aimed at calling, gathering and preserving these chosen ones and, in some mystical way, to also save the world through them.

Later, communism seemed at times to be equally staunch, as world evil (especially in time of Stalin), made it possible to follow such a black and white moral view. But the final collapse of Eastern-European socialist systems and the problems resulting around the world, have proven difficult to interpret with such simplified moral measures. It seems we have outgrown that kind of understanding.

Protection of the environment offered itself to sustain this art of international federal spirit, albeit concurrently with simplified moralization. Some social groups were ready to accept this perspective, but that was not the case with the World Council of Churches. It took a decisive step forward in understanding when the narrow term of the economic growth was substituted by the idea of development, and consequently the existing values of European societies were put into question. This step should be deeply appreciated and matched by trying to explain its inherent meanings.

3. Development of man -- its meaning and importance

The preliminary texts of this present conference concede that the meaning of "Sustainable development" may contain some hidden contradictions.

In western thinking, the idea is widespread that development proceeds mainly in the economy by means of scientific-technological innovation. A cultural process is preconditioned by this view, and some political ones too. However, it contains nothing about altering of the essence of mankind. Implictly or explictly, most people are not willing to face or comprehend decisive changes in the mode of human existence and morality. The Christian churches share this opinion. For them it is a very important question, perhaps touching their fundamental theses, and it confuses them radically.

Anthropological sciences (physical-, social-, historical anthropology, development psychology, etc.) draw another picture, according to which development is valid over man’s totality, affecting his entire substance and not only the outward elements of his existence. The strange meaning of this picture is that man is unfinished, not a perfect being either in his individual constitution, nor in his community structure.

This statement may be formulated on a more abstract level, raising its logical content, that limited interpretations of development avoid or refuse to refer the grasped idea to the thinking and acting subject, namely to man, church and God. Logically it is quite absurd to present an idea as being valid in different particular senses, though not in its totality, generality. If we want to discuss development in the world, then we must examine its coherence, inquire as to its extent and generality, and accept the result consistently.

In theology, I think the gravest consequence of this statement about development is the conclusion that substantial change of mankind in the course of history is incompatible with the absolute authority of the Bible as God’s final and eternal manifestation, inclusive of God’s perfect representation in the person of Christ. Everything we know about God by Christian tradition is supposed to come from God’s self-revelations in the Old and New Testaments. However this entire concept is based on the perfection of man. Only a perfect creature may adequately reflect God and wear, grasp and express God’s image. This thesis is fundamental in the doctrines of the Christian churches which claim authenticity for what are meant to be the Christian truth.

4. Insufficient self-interpretation of religions

Nevertheless this concept - like a gnoseologic basement - enchains the methodology in thinking and conducting church life, and it corroborates the whole of the churches’ traditionalism and archaism as expressed in:

• authority (hierarchy) - holding believers in dependency
• emotivity, subjectivity - animistic personifications
• definitive, teaching statements - manifests, doctrines
• mythological representation - narrativity: allegories, metaphors
• exclusivity: rejection of other religions, striving to eliminate them

The Christian church matured in the Middle Ages and hasn’t arrived at transubstantiation since. For some two hundred years the church tried to solve its problems by new and newer inner reforms, but instead of providing adequate, coherent answers or altering basic traits, these reforms defended and revived old ones. The churches were unable to appropriate the real truth in opposite thoughts and to use them in building a new true self. Real historic novelties - not accepted by the church - furthered antagonism and were compelled to go beyond it to formulate and institutionalize outside of the church.

When these new true thoughts stood up against it (were objectified), the church began to defend itself, stating them to be worldly evils. These outward conflicts generated new waves and trends of defense and self-justification: pietism, Puritanism, movements for revival, fundamentalism, mysticism, outward modernization, insubstantial rationality.

Lukas Vischer in his preparatory document for this consultation mentioned the turnabout in theological interest during recent decades from Christology toward inquiries about creation. As such, negotiating with the civil sciences and their results is a relatively peaceful terrain for theology. Here one might avoid the problems which necessarily led Christology to sharper collisions with new findings in the social and anthropological sciences. Notwithstanding, it was a step forward. Among other things, it made it possible to pose questions about endangering the human environment - as mentioned biblically: God’s Creation. But then came our most immediate world problem, the collapse of socialist power and its economic construction, bringing with it a worldwide employment crisis, largely in the former socialist countries of Eastern and Central Europe. Again we are helpless without a more adequate interpretation of development and a better understanding of the process of world-history.

5. The civil view of development and of human beings

The idea of development is also weakly summarized in civil - scientific consciousness. Nevertheless the details, however dispersed, are far more coherent in their scientific-rational nature than those bound to the medieval traditions of the church. Concerning nature it is called evolution; and in human society, development. Thus we have no single term to represent this whole integrated process.

At the start of civil society, humanists and revolutionaries used the model of antiquity, and they set their goal in returning to it. Nevertheless with this "return" they wanted to enforce the ideas of freedom of conduct and equality of acceptance for every individual.

Max Weber in his famous Ethics of Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism started a far reaching explanation for this question. He made a historical distinction between the two parts (catholic and protestant) of Christian thinking, but in a practical aspect, mainly in the field of norms of economic behavior. He demonstrated that protestant norms are suitable to accumulation and supportive of operations with money as capital. Thus this new kind of man (the protestant) suits the demands of the age (i.e. early capitalism) and the other old type - with catholic view and behavior - is less suitable, living with the remnants of earlier times, namely, the Middle Ages.

Karl Polanyi went farther and drew a historic genesis of the secularized newest category of man: the Homo Oeconomicus - with an entirely civil view of history and of man. It is impossible to deduce this category from biblical evidence and systematize this way because of the aspiration for total perfection. Homo Oeconomicus is a kind of man born to live from the market. By his properties or by his work, but anyhow by earning money and with these earning, buying everything needed first for subsistence and enjoyment and secondly to accumulate and activate as capital.

Thus money stands in the center of his life, an abstract which mediates everything for his use in the totality of his human existence. In ancient times this mediation was provided by the living community for each individual, the members of which divided among themselves the different labours necessary for the subsistence of all. Now Homo Oeconomicus has an open, depersonalized community made up of those present in the market with their goods, labours or moneys. In this abstract community, they are independent from each other i.e. individualized. Competitors are as removed as partners, bosses as employees, all distanced from one from another and yet all connected through money.

They have other connections too, but that made by money is the single essential, truly general, existential connection between them. Other communities which still exist largely outside of the mediation of money - for instance churches, the family, also even part of the state, and so on - are contingent remnants of ancient community forms of more natural times. They are unconvincing in the encounter with money-mediated groupings. Money embraces Homo Oeconomicus, isolates and renders him quite alone in actual life.

Accordingly, the self-experience of the individual became the centre of the cognition process. This way believing (in God and his other world) was opposed by bourgeois thinking: Nay, Descartes proposed even its pure opposite: doubting as a method to arrive at clear self-experience. Spinoza sets negation as the basis for every definition, and the Enlightenment wanted a cult to organize for objective rationality. At the peak of this abstract, anticipatory phase of civil development, German classical philosophy introduced contradiction and criticism as general methods for the new art of acknowledgment.

The more the church refused adequate elevation of its actual unfolding opposition, the sharper were those who turned against it with new civil and scientific consciousness:

• free-thinking and anticlericalism (enlightenment)
• atheism: the bourgeois, tolerant at first, later aggressive
• the socialists
• religious indifference and just beyond: non-Christian
• mysticism.

6. Development against biblical traditions

Are these fundamental changes in thinking to be considered just so many evils, development against the will and liking of God, and consequently --from the Christian point of view -- tending toward a bad end in human history? Or may we say that, though strange, they are something better and better, or clearly contrary to the doctrines of the church? Or may it be said (with the Renaissance Cardinal Bellarmin): they are both true; truth has a dual character?

We pointed out that changes in Christian ideology (theology) were hampered by the inability to admit the truth of opposite positions and thus to recognize its own insufficiency in developing new and positive universalities. Neither has bourgeois criticism and negation directed toward Christian theory, social praxis and role produced positive, effective relationship paradigms concerned with the whole human being in respect to the present universe. In the system of bourgeois society, human existence closes in on the individual. Generality is in an abstract, objectivated form, which is money. Money is the real embodiment of the human community: an open power to exchange all labour and products of other humans. So it represents total contact between all people and negates and excludes everything outside of this mediation, other kinds of human connections and of nature. These are "externalities" for the market where the valuation of all things in existence happens. What is not represented here somehow cannot have any real value.

7. The limitations of the civil concept

We find that the present civil definition shaped to man by himself reflects previous human states and conditions only negatively up to now. This definition is an active, subjective part of the total determination which limits the possibilities of our existence - may we say, our fate. This negative mode is total as concerns God in the context of civil consciousness: belonging to Homo Oeconomicus, we are unable to reflect any transcendental being, incapable of regaining resolved, consonant relationships between the Universe as a whole (the totality of being) and our own existence, our particular subjectivity. Although we suffer from this lack of transcendence and have the impulse for it, we cannot it realize inside the general framework of this definition.

Closed in the bourgeois determination of humankind, the totalization of individuality leads to unbearable consequences. In this line of reification, the self-alienated man loses his universality, his freedom for solidarity with other men and nature, along with the wholeness of his being. This progresses beyond every understood limit (demographic destruction, political-economic corruption, expansion of crude egotistic pleasures, etc.) and is impossible to stop inside the limited framework of an underlying "Oeconomicus" determination of human beings.

If we try to rediscover "God" (in the broadest and quite open sense) in the wholeness of our historically and evolutionary given world - and self - we must be able to also attribute some other intentions to God - as taught by the Christian church - revelations out of history. The process of history is open-ended like creation. The solidifying results of development we must accept as God-made, foreseen and intentional. Consequently, new forms of existence just being born and recognized by us, need our help in coming to be, in realizing themselves. Therefore we must inquire as to God’s likely intentions in the actual and past events of our common world, where God acts parallel to, around and through us, also bringing forth this newest make-up of each human being.

No return in history is possible, and we cannot discard the achievements of capitalism and bring back into use old social and intellectual forms. We have become acquainted with the process of development and must use this wonderful knowledge. According to Hegel’s dialectic, the flow of development proceeds by raising and preserving old forms, and in that way, transforms earlier categories and relationships, negating the former negation. Neither the idea of God nor of Homo Oeconomicus stands above this process: they are our selves. In this time of fleeting alteration, in an evolving dominance of intellectual-information production, we must also change and promote a new shape of humanity and of God beyond capitalism.

A. Z. Csanády, page 1 of 1