I posted this excerpt from Walter Wink's Engaging the Powers a few weeks ago as a response to a comment on my entry on afflicting the comfortable. With Obama's inauguration coming up, it's been on my mind:

God did not create capitalism or socialism, but there must be some kind of economic system. The simultaneity of creation, fall and redemption means that God at one and the same time upholds a given political or economic system, since some such system is required to support human life; condemns that system insofar as it is destructive of full human actualization; and presses for its transformation into a more humane order. Conservatives stress the first, revolutionaries the second, reformers the third. The Christian is expected to hold together all three.