Florence Spurling: Welcome to Encounter on ABC Radio National, I’m Florence Spurling. I’ve called this program ‘Soul, This Night’, and it’s the first in a three-part series on present day consumerism, which takes its bearings from the parable of the rich fool in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 12, and from other ancient and modern sources.

During these three programs we’ll hear from biblical scholars, Christian theologians, a businessman, a sociologist, and Catholic priests working with their people in the city and in the Solomon Islands.

This week we begin on Queensland’s Gold Coast, at Surfers Paradise, where Juniper’s Group Sales and Marketing Manager for Queensland, David Kortlang, is telling us about their 77 storey apartment building which is about to be built there. The building is called Soul, and later in this Encounter we’ll be following the story of its name as well as the story of a rich man’s dialogue with his soul in the Gospel of Luke.

David Kortlang: And this site is the end of Cavill Avenue, right on the beach. So we saw that it was time Surfers got a new soul, and that soul is obviously the heart of the city, but also it’s the ethos of the city. And we see it as the spirit part of this is going to be engendering a new spirit back into Surfers.

Florence Spurling: And what sort of things do you mean by that?

David Kortlang: It no longer will be a tourist town. Surfers when it started, perhaps in the 1920s, was a place where people came and had beach houses. We see it returning back to a place where people come to live, where they buy an apartment in a building like Soul, and they come and live here, perhaps not full-time, perhaps part-time, but they can then come out of their apartment down to a whole new revitalised commercial precinct, a precinct that acknowledges the fact that as we stand here now, we can have lunch and watch the waves break.

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Reader: Someone from the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me’. He responded, ‘Man, who appointed me your judge or executor?’ and he told them, ‘Watch out! Protect yourself from every form of greed. No one’s life is based on an abundance of possessions.’

Peter Corrigan: The biggest difference came with the Industrial Revolution. That’s the key separating point, I suppose, between agrarian societies and urban societies.

Florence Spurling: Dr Peter Corrigan is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of New England in Armidale. He sketches part of the development of consumerism in modern Western society, a different world from the agrarian culture of the Gospel of Luke.

Peter Corrigan: Before the Industrial Revolution there was a relatively small number of goods available for circulation. They would have been hand made, expensive, and they would have been mainly accessible to relatively small elite groups of people, the very well off, the aristocrats, those sorts of people. What happened with the Industrial Revolution is that the factory came about. The factory was the way of producing great numbers of goods, uniformly, cheaply. What happens then, you have all these goods, you need to get rid of them, and this is where mass consumption begins. You have cheap goods, many of them, you have people coming into new sorts of jobs, more money is becoming available, so you end up with many more people having the wherewithal to purchase goods, and it basically takes off from there, and the meanings of goods become more and more important to greater and greater numbers of people. I think that’s one of the key facts to the history of consumerism. It tends to start out among the very small numbers of people who can actually afford it, and then it spreads out further and further to greater and greater numbers of people in society, to more and more classes.

Louise Lawrence: Luke is writing somewhere in an eastern province of the Roman Empire, and presumably the Christian communities, or house churches, that he is speaking to, echo the intense kind of social stratification of the wider Roman Empire society of which the majority of resources are in the hands of a minority elite who take the lion’s share of these. The majority are poor, destitute, taxed beyond their limits, and there is a huge gap between the rural kind of agrarian lifestyle and the world of the rich elite minority. And Luke reflects, as all the evangelists do, some aspects of this agrarian world view.

Florence Spurling: Dr Louise Lawrence is Lecturer in New Testament Studies in the School of Divinity at the University of Glasgow.

Louise Lawrence: There’s been quite a lot of work done by anthropologists into a peasant world view, a peasant mentality, of what they call ‘limited good’, where harvests are dependent on a number of factors, and in such communities where you’re so dependent on the weather and yields, the community itself has to share resources, because there are limited goods. And greed, in this sense, is seen as quite a heinous thing. If the proverbial cake doesn’t get bigger, one person who has more than their fair share effectively assaults and takes away the goods from the rest of the group. And so this limited world view is actually one I think that Luke works with, even though he speaks to probably a mixed community of rich and poor.

And it struck me that the limited good environment was one which seemed to be completely opposite to the consumerist Western world, that almost lives by an opposite myth of unlimited resources – we can all go to the superstore and think that the shelves will keep on being replenished. And also I think this unlimited goods, unlimited resources also give some sort of false sense of your own self-gratification above the needs of the community. So I think Luke’s passage makes interesting reading in that respect.

Luke Timothy Johnson: Luke-Acts is a composition of the late 1st Century, written by possibly a follower of Paul, most likely a Gentile Christian who set out, in effect, to write the continuation of the biblical story by New Testament standards, a rather massive work of two separate volumes that are interconnected, literarily.

Florence Spurling: Dr Luke Timothy Johnson is the R.W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Emory University in Atlanta. His commentary on The Gospel of Luke is the third volume in the Sacra Pagina series, and it’s his translation from the Greek which we use in this Encounter, on ABC Radio National. We’re examining consumerism and the Gospel of Luke, particularly Chapter 12 and the parable of the rich fool.

Luke Timothy Johnson: Luke’s portrayal of Jesus and of the church has strongly prophetic overtones. He is, of all the gospel writers, the most public and political in his presentation of Jesus. There’s a very decided sense in which Jesus bears God’s vision for humanity which challenges the way things are in the world. And Jesus not only announces God’s vision for the world, which is, to put it mildly, a reversal of usual human expectations in which those who are on top will be on the bottom and those who are rich will be secondary to those who are poor and so forth. But he also embodies it in his lifestyle and he enacts it in his manner of healing and restoring the people. All of this can be seen as a continuation of the biblical theme of prophecy. So what Luke has to say about material possessions very much fits within this framework of what might be called a prophetic vision and a prophetic criticism of the way of the world.

Reader: He told them a parable. The land of a certain rich man produced a good harvest. So he began to calculate, ‘What shall I do? I don’t have room to store my crops’. He said, ‘I will do this. I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones. I will store in them all my grain and all my good things. Then I will say to myself, My soul, you have many good things laid up for years to come. Relax, eat, drink, enjoy yourself!’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is demanded of you. These things you have prepared, whose will they be?’

Such is the case with the person who builds a personal treasure but is not rich towards God.

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David Jasper: Oh, I think it’s very much at the heart of the desert tradition. It’s very much at the heart of St Antony’s initial move into the desert, where he was reading the Bible and was told to sell all that he had, give it to the poor, give it up and go into the desert to find his true vocation.

Florence Spurling: Dr David Jasper is Professor in Literature and Theology in the School of Divinity at the University of Glasgow, and he will return later in our Encounter series about consumerism when he will tell us more about the early Christian desert fathers such as St Antony.

David Jasper: The rich fool is like most of us, I suppose, obsessed with notions of security: how can we make our lives secure in the material terms of the world in which we live? And so what the story indicates is that kind of paradox. In Greek it’s called ‘chiasmus’ in which actually we have to let go all those things that we believe to be securities, in order to find the real security. That’s what they did in the desert, taking this absurd risk in a certain sense, in order to find the real business, the real security which is out there. So I think it’s very much germane.

We’re all rich fools to a greater or lesser extent, inasmuch as it’s very easy for us to think “Well, we’ve got our pension secured, and the mortgage is paid and we’ve got a little bit put away in the bank, nothing can harm or happen to us”. In one sense, that might be true, and I’m not suggesting that people should not necessarily do these things, but the desert fathers remind us that that’s really a quite tiny part of what it is to be a human being.

Luke Timothy Johnson: Generally in Luke-Acts, where Luke says something is as important as what he says. So looking at this parable in its immediate literary context is extremely important. First we notice that it follows a set of sayings that warn his followers concerning the dangers that they are going to face, but he warns his followers of these dangers precisely in a place in the story where he himself has come under danger, because the Pharisees and lawyers are seeking to kill him.

So Jesus turns to his followers and begins to talk to them about fear and anxiety. This is very important for the whole section. Whom are they to fear? He says, ‘You’re not to fear people, but you’re to fear God.’ And that distinction between fearing God and fearing other humans, or fearing even death, is critical.

In the middle of this discourse he’s interrupted by somebody who brings up what appears to be the most banal of concerns. ‘Lord, make my brother divide the inheritance with me,’ somebody says from the crowd. Jesus tells the parable in response to that concern for material possessions. And then, immediately after the parable, which concludes with the aphorism ‘Thus it is with those who have a treasure for themselves, but are not rich towards God’, he begins in Verse 22 to teach his disciples again about the use of possessions within the framework of anxiety and fear. So fear, anxiety, the threat of death and the use of possessions runs not only through the parable, but through this entire section.

Florence Spurling: So what are the sorts of issues that are there?

Luke Timothy Johnson: I think that all fear ultimately is the fear of death. If we cut deeply enough to things, our fear of diminishment, of slighting, of harm, of injury, of neglect, all of these in some sense point to that greatest of all fears which is of our finitude, of death. So there is something of a continuum between the fear of losing our life absolutely and all of those other kinds of fears or anxiety. And what Luke’s brilliance is, is to connect what he calls avarice – the desire for more stuff – to this theme of fear which is the same, whether it appears in what we might call acute situations (the threat of persecution) or chronic situations (my fear of growing old).

Florence Spurling: Professor Luke Timothy Johnson in Atlanta.

The Reverend Dr Andrew Gregory is Chaplain at University College, Oxford, and a member of the Theology Faculty of the University of Oxford for whom he has lectured on the Gospel of Luke. He has also written extensively about Luke and he’s a series editor for the Oxford Early Christian Gospel Texts.

Andrew Gregory: The context – here we are in an agrarian society, small, close-knit communities. This is a wealthy man within that sort of context. One of the first things that strikes me is his complete lack of relationships with anyone else as the story is told. And I wonder if there’s a hint that riches can isolate and distance someone from other people. Though he’s living in a society where tight-knit communities matter, this landowner has no-one but himself to talk to when he considers what to do with his crops. He addresses his soul. And I want to be cautious about trying to make any clear points to do with theological anthropology, in the sense of what’s the soul, what’s the mind, what’s the body. I don’t think that’s at issue in the use of the word ‘soul’ here. It more means his inner self, his inner being. He’s got absolutely no-one but himself to talk to when he considers what to do with his crops. And that’s very striking. There’s no-one else with whom he can dialogue.

We need to be careful with using the words, but in the Greek the verb that’s used here looks very like our word ‘dialogue’, so it could be emphasising that he has only himself to talk to. However, it can also mean just to think something through very carefully. And he has to do this with himself. It’s almost as if Jesus paints a picture of his isolation, of the kind of prison that wealth can build. This man actually has the money to buy a vacuum and to live in it, and life in this vacuum creates its own realities, and it’s out of this warped perspective that he plans for his future without any regard to the needs of others in the present and without any acknowledgment of God. This truly is the autonomous man who is also therefore the isolated man. And just in the way the narrative works, the narrator, Jesus, begins, ‘The land of the rich man produced abundantly and he thought to himself …’ the narrator then stops, and the man speaks for himself, he doesn’t even need the narrator. So we see someone who’s looking inward, who is perhaps completely trapped inwards. And it’s an interesting question whether or not he realises it, but for us, or for me anyway, that isolation is very prominent in that account.

Luke Timothy Johnson: Fascinatingly, among Jesus’ parables, this is the only parable of Jesus that has only one character who speaks to himself and then at the end of the parable, of course, God speaks to him. So there’s only the character and God, but there’s only one human character. And the story begins not with the rich man, but with his field: ‘His field brings forth an abundant harvest.’ And this puts the man who claims to own the field in something of a pickle. He says, ‘What shall I do?’ He has to calculate what to do with these possessions, and so he says, ‘I don’t have room to store my crops so I’ll pull down my barns and build bigger ones and store all my good things in them and then I can say to myself, Myself, you have many good things laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, enjoy yourself. And precisely at that moment, God says, ‘You fool, your life is demanded of you this very evening and the things that you’ve prepared, whose will they be?’

So the parable sketches precisely the distinction that Jesus says at the beginning: no-one’s life is based on the abundance of possessions. Luke’s Jesus draws a sharp distinction between life and possessions or, if you will, between being and having. The man is rich because he has a lot of possessions but he’s a fool because he assumes that those possessions will secure his life. And life cannot be secured by possessions.

Florence Spurling: In our present period, the word ‘soul’ has quite a loading. The New Age movement has often taken it on board. I notice your own translation of it is interesting.

Luke Timothy Johnson: Yes, well the word is “psyche” which is used in Greek for ‘soul’ in the sense of that which animates the body, or the higher self in a Platonic scheme, but it is also used frequently simply for ‘self’. And in this case, where we have a sort of an internal dialogue, the man with himself, and he addresses ‘psyche mou’, ‘myself’, I suggest it could be translated as ‘Listen, old boy’, because it is introspection.

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Reader: He said to his disciples, ‘For this reason I tell you: Do not be anxious about your life, what to eat, or your body, what to wear. For your life is more than food, and your body more than clothing. Watch the ravens. They don’t sow. They don’t harvest. They don’t have a storeroom. They don’t have a barn. God feeds them! You matter considerably more than birds. Can any of you add a moment to your life by worrying? If you can’t do even the littlest thing, therefore, why worry about the rest? Watch the lilies. How they grow! They don’t work. They don’t spin. But I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory was garbed like one of these. And if God clothes in such fashion grass out in the field that exists today but tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, people of little faith?

‘Do not keep seeking what to eat or drink. The nations of the world seek all these things. But your Father knows that you need them. Rather, seek his kingdom and these things will be given as well. Do not fear, my little flock: it has pleased your Father to give you the kingdom! Sell your possessions. Give alms. Make for yourselves purses that do not age, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven. No thief can get in there! No moth can destroy there! Where your treasure is, in that place your heart also will be.’

Andrew Gregory: We’re reminded of the Psalm, ‘The fool says in his heart, there is no God.’ Fool and foolishness – it’s not an intellectual term as such, it’s more a moral term. This man is living as if God did not exist, as if all that mattered was his material security to get him through the months and the years to come. But God says ‘You are a fool. What good will this do you? I’m going to demand your life’. So God is actually the one who takes and who gives life. And at that point, all his things are left behind.

And this brings us back to the opening words that Jesus used to introduce the parable: ‘Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions’. This man thinks that abundance of possessions will perhaps prolong his life, will make his life comfortable, but they can’t stop the moment of death, that’s completely beyond his control. And that’s why Jesus then goes on to talk about the ravens, the lilies and so forth. There’s nothing they can do to prolong their life, there’s nothing we can do to prolong our life, and of course we’re the modern technological society and with vaccinations and medicine we can. We’ve seen life expectancy rise, but the fundamental point is we still can’t live forever, and very often it’s beyond our control the moment at which we die. And no matter how much wealth we have, we can’t prevent that.

Florence Spurling: The Reverend Dr Andrew Gregory, University College, Oxford.

Professor Luke Timothy Johnson in Atlanta.

Luke Timothy Johnson: This person is clearly somebody who’s only concerned with himself and his relationship, his fundamental relationship, is with his possessions. But for Luke it’s not simply individual and communal that’s the issue, it’s whom are you to fear? And the notion for Luke is really spelled out best, it seems to me, when in Verse 32, where he says to his followers, ‘Do not fear, my little flock, it has pleased your Father to give you the kingdom.’ The two perceptions of life here are stark. Is human life a zero sum game in which we are all in competition and therefore need to accumulate everything we have by ourselves in order to secure ourselves? Or (and this is Luke’s version) is reality an open system in which God is always active to gift humans? And that’s why this language about the lilies of the field and the ravens and all of this stuff is pertinent to this passage. Because it’s precisely God who feeds them. And so the problem with the fool is that he has made himself solipsistic with his possessions.

Florence Spurling: Is the nature imagery another example of the transitoriness of life, the impermanence? Only God is permanent, so to speak?

Luke Timothy Johnson: Yes. Luke here in the language about – let me just read from my translation – ‘Watch the ravens, they don’t sow, they don’t harvest, they don’t have a storeroom, they don’t have a barn. God feeds them. You matter considerably more than birds.’ Okay, so that’s one part of it. ‘You’re more important than the birds, you’re more important than the lilies of the field.’ But Luke is not sentimental here. He says, ‘If God clothes in such fashion grass out in the field, that exists today but tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, people of little faith?’ Luke is very realistic, he belongs to the tradition of “qohelet” in the Old Testament, which unflinchingly faces the reality of death. So the issue is not, ‘Oh how lovely God has treated all creatures’, but the real issue is the grass goes in the oven, it dies, and so do you.

The difference is, for Luke, humans have a future with God, and this is part of Luke, his eschatology, which is difficult for contemporary people to get into, namely that this existence is not all there is.

Florence Spurling: Professor Luke Timothy Johnson at Emory University.

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Florence Spurling: We heard a little before from David Jasper about the early Christian desert fathers and their understanding of possessions. Dr Grant White is Principal of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, affiliated with Cambridge University through the Cambridge Theological Federation. He extends the story of other early Church Fathers and the question of wealth.

Grant White: For the 4th Century fathers, such as St John Chrysostom, St Basil the Great, St Gregory of Nyssa, writing and preaching in an era in which the church was beginning to become wealthy and to receive many wealthy people, the issue was how such people related to the wealth that they had, what they understood it was about – not only whether it was from their own work or it was a gift of God but, more importantly, what they saw their obligation to do with it was.

So you get sermons on the duty to the poor by St Basil, where St Basil says very clearly, ‘Look, you may have lots of money, but that is not yours. Ultimately it’s from God and God has given it to you so that you can give it to people in need. It is, at it were, a pledge given to you.’ We can quote other examples from St John Chrysostom and St Gregory of Nyssa as well. The point is that one’s wealth is really meaningless in relation to the kingdom of God; that what’s important is what one does towards fellow suffering human beings. If you have that priority right, then you’ll be okay.

Florence Spurling: Dr Grant White in Cambridge.

Back at the University of Glasgow, New Testament scholar, Dr Louise Lawrence takes up the modern story as she sees it.

Louise Lawrence: As the world becomes increasingly globalised, we realise that our kind of duties towards neighbour aren’t just about someone in our city or even in our country but actually the Third World where we become, in a sense, part of the problem. Not only churches that are actively campaigning for money and aid to send to these various countries, we had a very interesting campaign led by Bob Geldof that was the pioneer of Live Aid and called Make Poverty History which actually was less concerned with the material resources and more concerned with trying to change government policy. And I think that’s an important thing that again links to the Luke 12 kind of parable. We must see ourselves as the minority elite that have a stake in what happens to global neighbours throughout the world, and start thinking less of sin as kind of something personal that we need to sort out, and seeing sin as something structural, that policies on behalf of our neighbours in Africa, Latin America and so on, actually can make a difference.

Florence Spurling: How much might the world concern with climate change bring into sharper focus the images of nature Jesus uses?

Louise Lawrence: These sorts of texts give a great kind of agenda for a green ethos, and also again to sort of take the focus away from just personal relationships, to actually see a relationship with the environment, the very fact that Jesus can see the environment as an arena of God’s purposes. And it’s very interesting that the Bible begins and ends in a garden because I think our relationship with one another, our relationship with nature and our relationship with God, if they’re right then the environment is also right too. And so, definitely, I think that these sorts of texts should be used as an inspiration for all kinds of environmental issues – global warming – related to the unlimited goods ethos. We shouldn’t see the resources of the air for some things that are unlimited. So certainly I think you can be inspired by these kinds of images.

Peter Corrigan: For Luke, beauty was already there in the world, but it was there for things that were already perfect, and I think humans are not so perfect, in that sense. We can’t exist just as we are, we have to make sense of the world, and we must have our own versions of beauty in order to do this, and of course consumer goods and those sorts of things can be pulled into this, as indeed can versions of nature.

Florence Spurling: Dr Peter Corrigan again. He’s Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of New England, and the author of ‘The Sociology of Consumption’. I asked him to comment on the Surfer’s Paradise apartment building project, Soul, which began this Encounter on ABC Radio National. The building’s name and its concepts and aims bring together some of our questions about possessions, beauty, security, anxiety and perhaps even death. Peter Corrigan.

Peter Corrigan: Well, you need to take the name in combination with other characteristics of the complex. When you see it on the web pages, it’s a very, very large building. It’s 77 levels high, it towers above absolutely everything else, and that in itself seems to indicate a sort of desire to transcend the ground. What do you get above when you transcend the ground? Well, you get to the heavens, don’t you? So the sheer size of the building and the name of the building, seem to indicate a link to something much higher. The graphic for the word Soul – it has a very extended ‘l’ at the end, but the top of the ‘l’ it’s as if it disappears very slowly, so it’s like it is disappearing into clouds. So the very graphic of the name indicates a link between the building and up there in the clouds. You get a sort of an almost Godlike view of the world below.

Looking at the plans of the apartments, shows that there are views from all sides. Nothing gets in the way of our gaze and, of course, nothing is very likely to stare back at us. So we can look without being looked at. And I think this enhances our sense of control over the world and security from its troubles. We no longer have to worry about the world, because we stand so far above it. We can look down on it. Nobody’s looking at us, we’re looking at it. I think that’s a Godlike position.

Florence Spurling: Peter Corrigan.

Let’s return to David Kortlang the Sales and Marketing Manager for the apartment building, Soul, on the Gold Coast, and hear from both Peter Corrigan and him.

David Kortlang: We’re then looking to bring in far better quality retail components into this building, where people who live here can come downstairs and go to a good deli, go to a nice wine shop, buy something, go back to the apartment, buy some fresh seafood and live here. We want to get some life back into this city, not just a place for tourists who are here for a 24-hour overnight stay.

Peter Corrigan: If you look at the image on the website you get the impression of a great sense of light and space. And that is again what we would expect of heaven, in contrast to the narrow darkness of the netherworld in which we live (sorry to sound so dramatic). I think the use of very light colours in the scheme lifts us up. I think if we live in such a place, dirt will not distract us. So the height, the light, the space, the cleanliness makes it seem as if we’re actually disembodied beings.

Florence Spurling: But the body is very catered for in buildings of this kind, gyms and saunas, I mean what’s really at issue there?

Peter Corrigan: In this heaven-like state, we have a bit of a problem actually. On the one hand we want to feel free of our bodies, a disembodied spirit, that will be sort of the ideal existence for somebody in heaven. On the other hand, we are stuck with our bodies, like it or not, we haven’t quite managed to get away and stay alive, anyway. So, yes, we still need to take care of it. The sheer cleanliness of the presentation of the apartment, I think shows that our bodies are not actually going to be a trouble from the point of view of creating dirt and when they do talk about the body, they have what they call ‘a sanctuary’. That’s their word, not my word. And it’s composed of a day spa, a terraced pool deck, a sauna, a steam room, and a gymnasium. So your body, when you want to do things to it to keep it in good shape, enters a sanctuary, so the sort of heavenly metaphor is continued throughout.

If you want to think of consumer goods as a way of reaching some other state, if we live in this sort of a place, we’ve already got a bridge to something transcendent, to heaven. So in a sense, this building, metaphorically if you like, is a way of linking to a transcendent state.

Florence Spurling: Is this related do you think, overall, to questions of the fear of death? I’ve had one of the guests in this program suggest to me that all fear is basically a fear of death, and that consumer goods, consumer status, the very things you’re talking about, are sometimes ways in which people block off the fear of death. Does that make sense to you?

Peter Corrigan: Well, we all have to deal, I suppose, with the radicality of death and we can use consumer goods to negotiate a relationship with that. One way is the sort of ‘soul’ way we’ve been talking about, which is to give ourself the idea that we can actually get beyond death really on earth by evoking notions of heaven.

Florence Spurling: What about the image of the sanctuary of a day spa? There’s another word that’s got this spiritual or religious overtone to it. Can you talk about that?

David Kortlang: I think the day spa, if one was wanting, has permeated Australia recently. I think that particularly we work in Palm Cove where we did our first Sea Temple, it’s called the spa capital of Australia, every resort has a very high-end spa.

Florence Spurling: David Kortlang. Juniper’s Sales and Marketing Manager for the building, Soul, on the Gold Coast.

David Kortlang: I think people are finding time to find themselves, Florence. I think a spa’s more than just about cosmetic treatment, it’s about finding some time for you, to have an hour off. A bit longer, where the only sound you hear is your own heart beating, the only sound you hear is some nice music in the background. And I think we in life today need to find time for that, and I think people are gravitating to spas, again, not for the cosmetic treatment I think for the spiritual treatment, and they’re becoming a fundamental part of every project we do.

Florence Spurling: What do you mean by ‘spiritual’?

David Kortlang: Well, I think spiritual is finding yourself. I think the word ‘soul’, soul is yourself, and you spend your time finding your own soul, spending more time thinking about you, your life, and the people in your life, and that to me is what spirit’s all about, and I think that that’s why this building has got that ethos to it. We want it to be a place where you can come back and find your soul, find some spirit and spend some time in fantastic locations doing it.

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Florence Spurling: David Kortlang at Surfer’s Paradise in Queensland.

In Cambridge, England, Orthodox scholar Dr Grant White, has something to say about the building Soul, particularly in the light of the teachings of the early Church Fathers.

Grant White: I suspect that if St John Chrysostom were to look at that website today, he would simply condemn it outright as an obscene example of the isolation of the rich from the poor, and the misuse of wealth to create a class of people who live isolated from others. It’s a beautiful site, and the building looks like it’s going to be magnificent; I’m a fan of modern architecture and I enjoy looking at the building. So I have competing loyalties, shall we say. But in terms of the use of this kind of language of spirituality – the ‘sanctuary of a day spa’ – this kind of religious language appeals, obviously, to people isolated from God in today’s world, but one can also see it simply as a cynical use of that deep hunger and thirst for God to sell this building. It just raises all kinds of issues that the Fathers raised before already about the isolation of rich from poor, and the use of wealth.

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Florence Spurling: I’ve had scholars overseas who’ve looked at your website say to me that they raise the question about the wealth disparity, that only people well-off can afford this type of sanctuary, this type of soul-finding. Is that something that as a business person that interests you, the way in which wealth creates a certain type of seclusion, a certain type of privacy and ability to find yourself?

David Kortlang: I think it’s one extreme to the other. I think you see that if you go back to the sort of hippie era of the late ’60s, people with no money had time to find spirit, had time to find soul because they had no material possessions to worry about and they spent their time doing that and I believe that still exists very strongly in society today. So yes, we are in a materialistic location, yes, the piece of land we’re standing on has been valued at over $100 million; that is just the piece of land, the all-up cost of this project is $750 million. It’s a lot of money. The average apartment in here is about $1.8 million for the typical apartment. And the penthouses range through to $16 million, so there’s an expensive entry point.

Having said that, the day spa facilities in this building will be open to the public, there will be private areas and there’s public areas. We see this as a location to come back and find your soul. To explore your spirit at a level like this overlooking the waves breaking on the beach is something I think is a available for us all to enjoy, albeit one must pay for those facilities, it won’t be free. So it’s all looking very much inspired by the ocean, the blue, the white, and the sand and the sandstone, and the driftwood, is what’s driven the whole environment we’re in. The interiors of these apartments is where you find your soul, these apartments. It won’t have every finish known to man in it, this will be a very pared back minimalistic style, everything about it just blends and is driven by the colours of the beach and the ocean.

Florence Spurling: So you don’t think that’s a bit disembodied, a bit too surreally clear and white? There’s no mess here. Can you imagine the sort of mess children would make, or pets? I mean it’s not that kind of community you’re looking towards, is it?

David Kortlang: Oh, to a degree. This is a children-friendly zone, this is a family destination, I think the driftwood you see sitting in the corner there, it’s as rough and as natural as you’ll get, and obviously we want to make sure that our apartments are punctuated by that. This will not be minimalistic Zen, this won’t be Sydney urban comes to the beach. No, this is not that, far from it. We’re coming back to those qualities of modern architecture, but it’s driven in the essence of having texture, of having warmth. This is very much at one with the beach, albeit at a high-end quality, as opposed to being the ramshackle old beach house that grandma used to have and it’s got all the second-hand furniture left in it. We want to preserve the qualities of her beach house by having the lovely old table there, but the rest is punctuated by premium quality finishes and style in the kitchens and the bathrooms.

Florence Spurling: All of us in the West try to find security through possessions. How much do people at the end of the day have to face the reality that we’re all going to die, we can’t stay here forever, this isn’t heaven on earth in a permanent sense.

David Kortlang: I find that you should retire to go and live, you shouldn’t retire to then go and die. And I see too many people, my parents included, that left a wonderful established social life in Brisbane to move to the Gold Coast and live in a retirement village, and I saw them die because they were completely divorced from social life. If my parents, as many other people who are the same age group, had have come and bought into a building like Soul, and put their money into a wonderful piece of real estate, which they could have geared and used, and their family and their children could have used as a means of using the equity in it to give those people a quality of lifestyle that was far better than living in a retirement village 20 minutes drive west of Surfer’s Paradise, where they had no social infrastructure whatsoever, they had no relationship with restaurants, no relationship with movies, no relationship with going downstairs and buying a nice book, they had a relationship with people who were old and dying. And they died a lot quicker because their life wasn’t enriched. They died because they basically lost their whole social relationship.

We see buildings like this as being places where people should come and retire to, should come and live the quality years of your life, come here, get revitalised, be exposed to beautiful restaurants, go and buy a nice bottle of wine – you can’t drive any more?, just go downstairs in the lift and get one – go to a good bookshop, go to a good cinema, have your family come and stay, and knowing that you’ve been active 24 hours a day if you wish. So the Western world, to answer your question: use your assets wisely. Yes, why not end up living your life here, as opposed to living it in a social desert somewhere, and you’ve cashed your chips in and your leaving a few shillings to your children.

Florence Spurling: David Kortlang. And we leave Surfer’s Paradise now and return to Dr Louise Lawrence at the University of Glasgow, who reminds us of the Gospel of Luke, its teachings about wealth and possessions and how she sees the place of the gospel in our present.

Louise Lawrence: In many ways it seems an unworkable, radical ethic for the Western world today, and I think sometimes the temptation for comfortable Christianity is to interpret scripture in quite a different way to how we would see it now. But I think there are some interesting crossovers. One that occurred to me was the present day fascination with glamour and celebrity, and we have various TV shows here in Britain where people are famous for being famous. We have one called Big Brother.

And it almost seems that a society that propagates this kind of entertainment is itself pursuing an empty treasure, fallible and liable to be taken away from them in a split second just like the rich fool in this parable that cannot add one day to his life. It almost seems that Luke would want us to kind of examine the mythologies that the media and magazines are trying to give our kind of society. But I think it is very important that these kinds of texts actually can rein in, can police the mythologies, if you like, that we live by today, indeed they have to.

It’s very interesting that Luke’s ethical advice is often given to the rich characters within the gospel. For that reason alone, some Third World interpreters have actually given Luke’s gospel a hard time. They kind of said, ‘Well, isn’t it that in many ways Luke kind of makes the poor a mere pawn in their moral virtue?’, but I think he was very aware as we have to be today, that a minority group that shares and controls the majority of the world’s resources, really are the ones that can make a difference. And so they’re the ones that need to give quite a rigorous self-examination on their own.

It’s also interesting in relation to the eschatological perspective which I think can also be a disincentive to us today, paying our mortgages and our taxes to give up everything. And as you say, look at the lilies in the fields. And Luke here also has this world to come kind of perspective. But that again is problematic, I guess, from a liberation perspective. If there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and the last will be first, but only in the future, does that mean that the status quo remains the same in the present? And I think Luke would certainly want to say, ‘No, it has to change.’

I was struck by the slogan used by Christian Aid that says ‘We believe in life before death’, and I’m sure that is one of which Luke would approve, that the Christian community has to embody the ethos of Jesus of Nazareth in the world today. They are the Kingdom on earth.

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Louise Lawrence: I think a good example of how the Christian community themselves embody the ethics of the Kingdom for Luke is in the Eucharist – which we kind of think of in a quite liturgical sense, but for early Christianity it would be an evening meal where they would have the bread before the meal, and then after supper they would have the cup. And for many, the poor and destitute, I guess the Eucharistic meal was the one good feed they would maybe have. And it provided physical and spiritual sustenance, comfort food in all its senses. And this Eucharist became a kind of symbolic pre-figura to the Messianic banquet. So for Luke, the easing of ills isn’t just a future promise, it’s always a concrete present reality. And if people forget that in Christian communities today then they’re forgetting the whole ethos of the kingdom that Luke wants us to take on.

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Florence Spurling: My thanks to Dr Louise Lawrence and to all who took part in this Encounter on ABC Radio National. I’ve called the program ‘Soul, This Night’. We’ll return to an exploration of consumerism in the coming weeks. A number of our guests on this week’s program have published extensively on the Gospel of Luke and themes relating to modern consumerism. The reader for this Encounter was Veronica Neave and she read Professor Luke Timothy Johnson’s translation from the 12th chapter of the Gospel of Luke. Technical production, James Ussher and Peter McMurray.

MUSIC FADES

MUSIC USED IN THIS PROGRAM

Arvo Part “Fratres” Tracks: Summa for Strings, Fratres for strings and percussion, Festina lente for strings and harp ad lib. Published by Naxos

BOOKS RELEVANT TO THIS PROGRAM

Peter Corrigan, The Sociology of Consumption: An Introduction (London: Sage Publications, 1997)

David Jasper, The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art and Culture (Blackwell Publishing, 2004)

Luke Timothy Johnson, Faith’s Freedom: A Classic Spirituality for Contemporary Christians (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1990)

Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke (Sacra Pagina Series 3; Daniel J. Harrington SJ Editor: The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota, 1991)

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/encounter/stories/2006/1667319.htm#