Questions in the economic crisis

Politics

Written by John McNeil Thursday, 18 June 2009 09:04

National church leaders met the Prime Minister, John Key, and the Minister of Finance, Bill English, in April, and told them it is just as important for New Zealand to emerge from the recession with a robust society as it is to emerge with a robust economy.

"To achieve this, we will need policies that have a long-term focus," said the Right Reverend Dr Redding, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, writing in the Presbyterian magazine Spanz.

Dr Redding, says the economic crisis provides us with an opportunity to ask questions about the nature, sustainability and consequences of the current economic order, and to ponder what a different ordering of our priorities and commitments might look like.

"From a faith perspective, the current economic order fails to account for three significant truths about our humanity: the possibility that our humanity might have a higher purpose than the pursuit of individual happiness; the possibility that freedom might consist of something more than the freedom to acquire and consume; and the reality of sin.

"Our insatiable appetite for consumer goods, and the consequent failure to distinguish between wants and needs, is a sign not of our freedom but of our captivity," Dr Redding said.