You can't come here from the U.K. without being aware that you are coming to the place from which the world is run. And if that's a hard thing for you to hear because, in your life you don't feel like one of the people that's running the world (and I'm quite sure that is true), it nevertheless is important to face the fact that I am constantly faced with the reminder just how much this country is the engine and the rudder that directs the ship of the world (and if I were from a two-thirds world country the reminder would be even more constant).

And that is even more true since the collapse of the one alternative economic system that was running. We are into a period, I guess until the Chinese really come on stream, of the undisputed mastery of the world by the U.S. (apologies for the masculine expression, but it's probably entirely appropriate). And as we hear about the possibility that the dreams of people for the ending of weapons of mass destruction might indeed come to pass, we have to reflect soberly that those weapons will only be destroyed because in large measure they are not really necessary anymore, because we actually can control the world by other means, namely economic means.

I, too, wanted to take up from the little anecdote that Simon Chiwanga [Chiwanga is Bishop of Mpwapwa in the Anglican Church of Tanzania. He preached at the General Convention eucharist the morning of the reception.] used about Oliver Cromwell and the silver. But I want to take it up in a slightly different way from Douglas Theuner [see Theuner's acceptance remarks], by asking the question, what would we do now in the world, if we found ourselves short of currency? Because it's not until you ask yourself that question that you begin to see the true character of the world we currently inhabit and which is being so powerfully driven particularly from this land. If you ask the question, "What would we do if we found a shortage of currency in the world today?" you have to say to yourself that such a situation could never arise. For Oliver Cromwell lived in a world -- and we all did until the early years of this century -- in which currency was indeed a limited commodity. And as a result, in part, of the Great Depression and of Keynesian economics we learned that money was in fact a created commodity; that it was open to human beings to create money. In part, doing that was the source of tremendous relief of poverty during the Great Depression. The New Deal would not have been possible had there not been the wisdom to realize that money could be created by governments for the purpose of alleviating the poverty of the poor.

What I want to talk about is what has happened to that wisdom, to that insight, in the last 30 years in particular, the era since Reagan and Thatcher, the era of unlimited financial growth. Something has happened which has deeply affected the landscape which we inhabit. It has affected it in a huge variety of ways and I shall only mention one or two of them. The principal way in which this piece of social change surfaced was in the emergence of the international debt crisis. When I was researching into the question, "Who is Jesus Christ for us today?" I found myself with two particular answers which gave rise to two particular pieces of writing. One was that I found that Jesus, in his activity of healing and reconciliation, was a person who always addressed a double thrust in his healing activity: a thrust towards the person suffering (a thrust, that is, to the locus of the illness): and then a thrust of a systemic kind, towards that which caused the illness in the first place, or which compounded it. And the little book Rescue, which some of you have seen on the bookstall at the back there, is about that double thrust.

But more seriously I find myself faced with the issue of debt as the locus of a social illness which needs to be confronted. And as I stood at what I must frankly say was the very small and courageous demonstration about Jubilee 2000 behind the convention center yesterday, I found myself thinking that we need to maximize the potential of the debt issue to gain people's allegiance for the prospect of justice both in our world and in the two-thirds world. For make no mistake, the international debt crisis is not a "one-off accident," something that happens to have gone wrong with the system. It's not an unfortunate virus that's come from somewhere. It's not a freak weather storm. It's intrinsic to the system under which we are now operating, which has to do with uncontrolled hegemony of money.

Let me say what I mean. When the oil producing countries increased the prices of oil products in the early 1970s, one result was a huge influx of money into the banking system of the developed world. And that huge influx of money combined with the way our banking system works to produce a multiplier effect so that the quantity of money in circulation world-wide simply exploded. That would have been bad enough. For it meant that the banks had to employ (effectively) sales people to go round the world 'selling this money'. Now you sell money by lending it. You lend it to produce interest in the way that Juanita Nelson described in her letter. And that's a sales operation. And a whole lot of people -- a lot of them with immensely good intentions -- thought they were offering to the poorest nations of the world a way out of their problem.

In the process, of course, they did get into some very bad deals indeed. They lent to corrupt regimes. They lent to military regimes. They lent to dictatorial regimes so that the people of South Africa now have debts arising from the purchase of tanks that killed their parents. They got into some bad deals. And incidentally if you ever hear anybody saying "We mustn't remit international debt because it could lead to corruption", just ask them where they were when the loans were made in the first place. But it is true, there were some bad deals.

But it's also true that there were some very good intentions. But even so, the result was to create a debt-servicing problem for the poorest nations. For when the wealthy nations decided they had to jack up interest rates in order to protect themselves from inflation that was arising from all this surplus money, the poorest nations of the world found themselves paying at a rate that was quite beyond anything that had ever been envisaged. And that's the root of the international debt crisis. It means that countries are paying back money which they have already paid many times over. And that's why the remission of international debt is not a piece of charity; it is a justice issue. Absolutely and clearly it is a justice issue! And of course, realistically when the leaders of the G8 nations meet, they are motivated most often by case by case appeals to compassion. But the reality is we've made a heap of money out of international debt and its time we stopped. And it's as simple as that.

But I repeat: this is not a one-off accident. When the banks found they'd exhausted the potential for selling money by means of international loans, they still had money that they needed to do something with. And the result is a double system of credit. And although I may get things wrong because I know more about Britain than I know about the US, I suspect that situation here is not that different. The surplus money went into lending money to people to buy houses in large numbers. It went into consumer credit. If you want to know where you are in society, ask yourself, are you a person who has to beg a money lender for a loan to last the rest of the week at a very high interest rate or are you a person who gets three mail shots a week asking you to take out another loan. Which are you? Because most of us, most of us who are the most well-off, are people who are constantly being asked to absorb this extra money that is floating around, which needs a home and which needs to make more money.

I tell the story often of my wife's parents who bought a house for 600 pounds in the mid-1930s and took out a mortgage. (Mortgage is French for "deathgrip" or "death-gamble".) They took out a mortgage and they believed that it was important for them to pay this loan back as soon as possible. They believed that for two reasons. As good Protestants, they'd been brought up to believe that being in debt was wrong unless it was absolutely necessary. Hardly anybody here believes that. Or if they believe it, they don't live it. Like most of their generation, they did believe that. The second thing they believed -- and this was true at that time -- was that if they paid their loan back quickly, somebody else that needed it more than they did would be able to have it. These days you go into the institution that has lent you the money to buy your house, and say "I feel I ought to repay this loan, because somebody else must need it more than I do" and you will be laughed at if you are not charged a penalty! And the reason is that the economic situation has changed. Oliver Cromwell could not now face the difficulties he faced. That's exactly the point. Oliver Cromwell, if he were alive now, would simply print the money. Or if he didn't print it, there would be banks eager to lend the money to the government. He would have no such problem.

But with that increase in the amount of money, with that increase in the interest that it can earn, with all of that there comes an increase in the power of money in our lives. This morning there was kindly deposited outside my hotel bedroom the local Sunday newspaper. I lugged it into my room (a hefty operation) and did one immediate piece of research, which I do whenever I see any newspaper, which is how many pages in it are devoted to the management of money. The paper could be a good deal lighter if those pages were not there. And if you imagine the Sunday pages of 30 years ago, those pages would either not be there or be far fewer. And the reason they are there is: people want to read them. They're not printed for nothing. People want to read them because we are all to be our bankers. We all have to think about money again and again because we all have an old age ahead of us and money is offered as the solution to the problem of old age. We all have to be interested in it and so we are all increasingly dominated by it.

But what is this money? I want to suggest to you that it isn't simply that debt is measured in money; it is that money is debt. As the quote from Ruskin in Juanita Nelson's letter made clear, money is a claim on the resources of others and the labor of others. It is actually a debt. And the more money there is around, the more those claims are exercised on the resources of the world and the labor of other people. And the resources of the world are the resources that our children will actually have to live off too. And therefore, what is actually happening with the accelerating power of money is that a debt is being incurred. The universe, this planet, is being used as a unique credit card which has no credit limit and no repayment date on it. And we all like credit cards like that.

The result is that the generation of money produces the generation of environmental degradation. Money is the key and the understanding of money is the key to so much that is going on. And you see it isn't just that the amount of money has gone up hugely in the last thirty years, we also have the new globalizing technology. Let's be clear: most of that technology is wondrous in its results. But it means that money that previously circulated in note form, in checks, in paper form, now traverses the world ten times, twenty times, a hundred times as fast. So you actually have a huge multiple of the amount of money traveling at a huge multiple of the speed. And all that is what makes the world go round. And it's all about debt.

Money has now become not just an instrument, it has become also, as well as an instrument, an economic goal in itself. And that is true in the lives of most of us if we're honest. It has become a source of security and a form of salvation. In Britain, we have recently created a national lottery. And there's a slogan for selling lottery tickets. It consists of a crossed finger emblem (like this) but pointing downwards and the slogan is: It could be you. And like the original slogan that launched credit cards, "it takes the waiting out of wanting," we have in those slogans the profoundest spiritual attack on the fundamentals of the Christian gospel. "It could be you" is a slogan that should be reserved for the challenge for the vocation to serve God and to follow Jesus Christ! It could be you is what we should all be feeling when we read the story of Jesus summoning the disciples, of the Lord summoning prophets: "It could be you!" But that's not what it means when it's used by the national lottery. What they mean is, this could be your way out of every problem. This could be your salvation. One of those million-pound prize tickets could be your solution to your life's difficulty. It could be you.

And "it takes the waiting out of wanting" is a similar attack on the fundamentals of the gospel. For taking the waiting out of the wanting is a profound attack on the spirit of Christian hope, for we know that waiting is absolutely crucial. Waiting upon God, waiting upon the purposes of Jesus Christ, is the most profoundly important thing that any human being can ever do. And the suggestion that waiting is a bad thing to do, is a thing that you can eliminate because somebody will give you the money now, is a very serious attack on the gospel.

I suppose that unlike the people who have been honored today I am sort of a theoretician. I'm concerned about theology and these realities that I've been talking to you about. These realities I've been talking to you about are realities that have fundamentally to do with who God is. A sociologist of money has said that money has imploded upon itself in our civilization and become mammon. That is, as the Lord said, it is God's principal rival when it becomes a god. It has no capacity, actually, to help the poor. Paradoxical as it sounds, throwing money at poor people will not change their lives. What is needed is a real sense of human solidarity.

Some of us were yesterday in the Convention Hall and listened to the Primate of Canada talking about the litigation which they face as a province as a result of the abuse cases from their residential homes. And there is serious possibility of the liquidation of their national church for lack of funds. And one of the things that he cannot say in his position, but which we have to notice, is that the notion that money can compensate victims of abuse is itself a terrible collusion with a money-dominated society. Of course he can't say it, because it looks like a cop-out, but we have to say it and we have to pray it, and we have to live it: that a world dominated by money will never help the poor, because money is only interested in maximizing it's own return on itself.

What then you will want to know before I finally pack it in: what then are we to do? What is the alternative? Let me first say that the capacity of money and the money society to generate the sense that there is no alternative is itself a part of its pretention to divine status. Read Psalm 82 and you will find there that God dethrones the gods because of their inability to help the poor. I want to suggest that the emergence of new forms of currency and local exchange trading systems in which people begin the process of exchanging gifts with one another -- not as loans, but as gifts -- gives some clue as to what it would take to discipline this overriding power of money. But more than that I want to suggest that everybody can rein in their use of credit and debt. Everybody can. And I do mean everybody. Even the poorest, who seem to depend upon it to get through the week can rein it in. And certainly the rest of us, who are constantly profiting the money institutions by using credit when we would not need to, getting sucked into the calculation of whether it might be cheaper really not to pay until next year, are getting drawn into a spirituality -- a spirituality that is fundamentally hostile to the spirituality of Christian faith and the Gospel. And I suggest that there are initiatives of that kind that individual Christian disciples can and should take. That's point one.

And there are three of these and then I'm going to stop. Point two is what can be done in our churches. I have to tell you that I only got into this subject some four or five years ago. But I have never ever had the expression of any theology that I've engaged in that has aroused such a response in churches. I have spoken at diocesan conferences at the end of which people have said, "You know, I've been through bankruptcy, but I would never dare tell anyone at church." "In my church", people say, "we don't talk about money, except that we need it. But we don't talk about what money means to us, the place it has in our lives."

And the first thing you need to do with any idol -- and that's what I'm talking about -- is actually to name it. And therefore, we all have a responsibility in our churches to begin the process of talking about this reality with the greatest honesty we can. And I do know how immensely difficult that will be. I was talking at one conference with an Argentinean theologian called Marcella Althaus Reid. She said she hadn't realized until she got to going to a church in the north of the world that being poor was something to be ashamed of in church. And I want to suggest that we have that responsibility and we have that possibility.

But some of us have the opportunity and have the need to play on the largest stages and I believe we have to begin to say out of the Jubilee 2000 experience that human beings are not to be enslaved to debt anymore and that the international control of money is a really, really important campaign, so that it is not controlled by the wealthiest nations, so that the debtors have some say in how money is distributed and used, so that the United Nations assumes some control over the currency processes of the world. And if you become involved in it, what you will find is that the issue of international debt has to be, can be, related to the debt that is being incurred by individuals every month, to the debt that's being incurred by the poorest communities. Not probably a thousand yards from here there are people juggling with debts, hoping to escape to the end of the week from that terrifying knock at the door. And more than that, middle class people are worrying in the small hours of the morning about how they will make ends meet and repay that debt that they were encouraged to take on when it looked easy. You will find a ready hearing if people are prepared to be honest about their lives.

In conclusion, I want to tell you that when I talk about the Lambeth Conference in 1998 I usually talk about it with immense pride. And the picture that comes to my mind -- you will be even more astonished -- is always the standing in line for food that went on. Because when you stood in line for food at Lambeth, you looked around and you saw a Christian gathering and you could say to yourself, "nobody other than the Church would bother to bring together on a one for one basis people, bishops, from all over the world." It was an astonishing collection of people! And I believe a lot of the things that went wrong with Lambeth were because we did not recognize that there are two globalization agendas around in the world today. There is the globalizing agenda of money and of the economic system and there is the gentle, just and holy globalizing agenda of Jesus Christ who calls us to be one with one another, members of one body world-wide, motivated by justice, honest in our dealings with one another, and prepared to be critical about the processes of globalization in which the power of money constantly catches us.

Peter Selby is the Bishop of Worcester, England, and author of Grace and Mortgage: The Language of Faith and the Debt of the World (1997). This is an edited transcript of the address he gave at The Witness's Spirit of Justice Awards reception at the St. Francis Center in Denver on July 9, 2000.