The Legacy and Social Vision of the Jubilee Centre

After almost 40 years of research, and the sad announcement of their closing, the Jubilee Centre is to close. Started by Dr Michael Schluter in 1983, Jubilee contributed innumerable articles, pamphlets, books, talks, and conferences bringing, in its own words, “biblical insight to bear on public life”. Jubilee tried to fill a gap that was less a gap than a crater, as ‘Evangelical social thought’ was an anaemic tradition. Jubilee was different, recognising the kingdom was now as well as not yet, and that its ‘nowness’ wasn’t simply a question of personal morality or stable families.

The Centrality of Relationships

The Jubilee Centre unearthed and fixated on the idea, from the Old Testament law, that relationships matter. Not ‘matter’ in the sense of being quite important, but matter in the sense of being everything. God judges a society not on its wealth or its liberty or its equality but on the quality of its relationships. This alerted many to the absolute centrality of relationships to the Christian social vision, including those between employers and employees, owners and managers, politicians and citizens, prisoners and free, immigrants and natives, teachers and pupils. It was nothing like a caricature, but instead taught a great deal about the Bible, politics, and economics.

A Biblical Template for Modern Society

The idea that the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, provides a template for society today is commonly known as theonomy, the rule of divine law. Convinced that said Law, and the Hebrew scriptures more generally, offers a template for modern society, the Jubilee Centre wanted to work out what this might look like. Time and again, Jubilee’s work was biblical, creative, and fresh. When Chris Wright, an Old Testament scholar, proposed doing his thesis on Old Testament social ethics, he was told not to bother because the subject didn’t exist; however, he and Jubilee helped revive it.

Political and Economic Dimensions

The result was a political programme that was politically unboxable. Publications could combine truly radical left–ish economic ideas with more familiar right–ish ones. To some, the closest political ‘position’ it approached is post–liberalism, though that label fails to capture how radical Jubilee ideas could be. This proto–post–liberalism occurred as people turned their backs on today’s culture of social and economic hyper–liberalism.

Table: Policy Framework of the Jubilee Centre

The turn to Old Testament Law was as fresh as it was unpopular. It’s an approach to Christian social and political ethics that moves beyond a lack of imagination. The Jubilee Centre's work remained focused on the fact that all relationships matter, providing a systematic socio–political theology by means of which a sustained response could be formulated.