Perspectief 2013-21

Perspectief 44 prof. dr. Fred van Iersel expressing their appeal to conversion to their fellow Christians. The document is built upon experiences of member churches and addressed to the WCC member churches, and it tries to reach these by speaking the language of spirituality, the moral language of justice as a moral virtue and as a value, and the language of witnessing of faith, hope and love, as well as the language of recognition of the importance of certain local situations or traditions. In short: the Agape document speaks the language of religious identity to confirm, strengthen and promote it. It speaks the ´language of Canaan´, but it mixes it up with hinting to social realities in the other domains without becoming specific about these re- alities or about the way these were analysed. 3 Lack of economic and political responses to be expected To be honest: I am afraid that the Agape Call for Action in its present form will not provoke any substantial social and political response. For this a document about spirituality, reli- gious identity, and about witness and willingness to change. It certainly is not about economy or about politics regarding economy. The key passage for this criticism is number 14's comment on 'market fundamentalism': this concept ' market fundamentalism' is reli- gious language referring to economy. But what exactly does this oppose to in socio- economic terms: does it oppose to any type of market economy, or only to certain types? Does it reject capitalism including the social market systems within it, and if so: which alternative system does it support? Or perhaps is the document just aiming at formulating moral criteria to all economic systems? This lack of clarity and specificity makes this doc- ument meaningless in economic and political debates. It can't and it won't work as a wakeup call for those bearing responsibility in the economic or political domain, because of its vagueness – even more so because of the lack of explicit interdisciplinarity within this document. 4 The methods of Christian social ethics urgently missed The quality of the document causes some worry to the interested reader: where has the traditional strength of Christian social ethics gone? Where is the descriptive and analytical clarity of economists involved in the WCC's work in 1948, helping it to understand the ´signs of the time´ in relevant economic terms? Where is the knowledge of historical and