By Dr James Eglinton, Meldrum Lecturer in Reformed Theology, University of Edinburgh

THE Paradise Papers have offered a fresh glimpse into the practice – seemingly common amongst the super-rich – of using (legal) international means in order to avoid taxation in one’s own country.

The papers’ publication is not shocking for reasons of novelty: that money can bypass the taxman in a circuitous, artificial and legal offshore journey was no great secret. Rather, their power lies in the scale – in pounds and personalities – of this practice. In an age of austerity and stark wealth inequality, unimaginable sums of money evade the public purse by perfectly legal methods. On the ground, the non-super-rich pay taxes, libraries close, state schools are under-resourced, and the NHS is stretched to the limit. In the air – if your budget allows – private jets transport those who can lease their own jets to firms that will lease them back to you, and in so doing, save you a hefty tax bill on your recent aeronautical purchase.

The standard defence of this practice – that “no laws have been broken” – confronts us with an age-old problem: how should we respond to those who are legally innocent but morally guilty? And to this we can add: what price do we pay if “no laws have been broken” is allowed to be the last word on the Paradise Papers?

Law and morality are not synonymous. That something is legal does not mean it is good: from Apartheid to Jim Crow, history has no shortage of immoral laws. In our context, however, we are confronted by the reality that one can keep the letter of the law while defying its (moral) spirit. In this instance, it is possible to comply with tax law whilst denying the basic purpose of taxation, namely, to fund the common good.

This is no new problem. The distinction between the letter and spirit of the law – and how to deal with their disparity – runs throughout the history of western culture: think of Jesus’s “‘woe to you who strain out a gnat but swallow a camel”, or Shakespeare’s agonising over Antonio’s pound of flesh in The Merchant of Venice.

The Paradise Papers are a striking example of the important but limited power of the law to shape a good society. In its threats of punishment, the law might discourage me from kicking a man who is down, but – because law is more effective in restraining vice than in enabling virtue – it does less to motivate me to help that man to his feet. To learn that, we need resources that cultivate an expansive view of the human spirit – resources neglected in our monetised, secularised, science-and-technology oriented society. Such resources, which challenge the human to be humane, were abundant prior to the rise of our post-Christian age. Indeed, the “letter versus spirit” distinction is itself a profoundly Christian idea.

However, our secular awkwardness towards our Christian heritage leaves us ill-equipped in dealing with these papers. In our attitudes toward education, for example, we neglect the humanities in favour of income-generating disciplines that – taken alone – can only view human beings in financial, material or legal terms. This renders us blind to the ongoing social utility of a discipline like theology, which lies precisely in its inability to view humans merely as financial, biological or legal actors. Theology has a unique power to face the Papers in piercing question form: “Who is my neighbour?”

To accept “no laws have been broken” as the last word means the reduction of our human relationships to loveless compliance with arbitrary rules. And that is stark poverty indeed.