The bishop's do it again

It is worth reading Rowan William's article in the Spectator as he evokes Trollope's

thoughtless and greedy young men in the Victoria era

who

can be lured into ruin by accepting ‘accommodation bills’ from their shifty acquaintances. They make themselves liable for the debts of others; and only too late do they discover that they are trapped in a web of financial mechanics that forces them to pay hugely inflated sums for obligations or services they have had nothing to do with. Their own individual credit-worthiness, their own circumstances, even their own personal choices are all irrelevant: the debt has acquired a life of its own, quite independent of any real transaction they are involved in.

Once again the Archbishop has fallen into a political trap,this time the debate over regulation in the financial markets.But he goes further invoking the spirit of Karl Marx who he says if he got little else right

long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves

Meanwhile he is joined by John Sentamu eminating his thoughts from the diocese of York who according to the BBC website

called share traders who cashed in on falling prices "bank robbers and asset strippers".

In matters clerical it is always good practice to turn to the blog of Cramner who says this on the subject

Does the Archbishop not understand that Mammon has been society’s idol for centuries, and that positioning the Church towards Karl Marx is naïvely simply supplanting one idol for another?
And Marx is in any case a curious exemplar for a church, as he sought to replace the Hegelian dialectic of the spirit with a materialistic dialectic located within the economic sphere. For Marx, the inadequacies of society were to be overcome by a transition from capitalism to Socialism and ultimately to Communism.

Capitalism he says

can be cruel, but so is nature. It is a manifest inconsistency for the Church of England in one week to apologise to the man who expounded a theory of survival of the fittest, and the next to denounce such a theory when it is manifest in the natural laws of economy and society.