Kruse Kronicle

Theologians and Economists: Parable of the Talents (2)

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In the previous post, we looked at the cultural and Scriptural context for the Parable of the Talents, Matthew 25:14-30. What are we to make of this parable?

The first thing I would draw attention to is the relationship of the wealthy man to his servants/slaves. One talent was equivalent to about twenty years of wages for a day laborer. These were large sums the master was entrusting to his servants (also meaning the master was a very wealthy man.) This was not a guy saying, "Here is $100. Go invest it." These were servants in whom the master was placing considerable trust.

Second, when the first two servants report back to the master, it is important to note what the master commends. He does not commend their profit or success. He commends their trustworthiness/faithfulness … they followed through on their mission.

Albert Harrill adds an important nuance to the role of slaves that may be lost on us today. Roman slaveholders didn't just expect their slaves to follow instructions … especially those entrusted with this kind of responsibility. Slaves were expected to take on the very mind of their master, acting as his proxy regarding transactions made in his absence. Faithfulness wasn't just following commands but becoming a clone of the master. The first two slaves demonstrated they had "cloned" their master's mindset and mission.

Third, there is the interaction between the third slave and the master. We have here a master … likely presiding over a vast estate … who likely considers himself to have acquired his wealth justly and to be proud of his estate management. Now note how the third servant justifies his actions:

24 …'Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; 25 so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.'

In other words, he already knows he is in trouble but justifies his behavior by saying, "Boss, I know you are a disreputable crook, so I hid the goods." How does this servant think insulting the master is going to appease the master? Is it possible that the servant mistakenly thinks he is actually glorifying the master?

I mentioned in the previous post that two types of characters tended to fit the "big man" model of the culture. One was the wealthy estate owner, and the other was the bandits known for raiding and taking what they wanted. Kenneth Bailey (Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes) quotes Cicero in The Republic, "The Gauls think it disgraceful to grow grain by manual labor, and consequently they go forth armed and reap other men's fields." (404) Similar views were held of Bedouin chieftains and their raiding bands who swooped and reaped what they did not sow. The characterization of the master by the third slave would have been flattery to such a bandit or Bedouin chieftain.

Bailey's point would be that the third servant has thoroughly misapprehended the status and character of his master. Thus, the master responds, "'You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? …" is incredulity. But even if the slave had correctly perceived the status of his master, he didn't act appropriately according to what he did know.

This third servant's lack of discernment and faithfulness parallels the message in the stories surrounding it in the narrative. Matthew 24 ends with a similar story of a man who leaves a slave in charge and returns unexpectedly to find the slave acting contrary to his master's will. The Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids features women who correctly discern the nature of events and act faithfully and those who don't. It precedes the Parable of the Talents. The next story is of the sheep and the goats, where the sheep demonstrate they have the mind of the King guiding their actions. Meanwhile, the goats, who think they correctly discerned their mission, demonstrate by their actions they have not understood. Embedded in the middle of these stories is the Parable of the Talents, where two servants demonstrate they have correctly discerned the master's will and have been faithful, while the third mistakenly thinks he has discerned his master's character and is led astray accordingly.

Fourth, these stories are the climax of Jesus' Mount of Olives discourse, in which he begins with a prophecy about the destruction of the Temple and then warns them not to be deceived by what is about to unfold. These stories seem to me to be illustrating this exhortation to vigilant faithfulness. (On an additional note, I'll also add that the time Jesus has in mind here is the time from his departure until his return in conjunction with the destruction of the Temple, which he perceives as the climactic end of the story. This was as far as the Father had permitted him to see in his prophecy. The Temple was indeed destroyed within a generation, as Jesus foretold, but his return was not to be in conjunction with his vindication by this event.)

So that brings us to the implications of this parable. Is the Parable of the Talents an affirmation of wealthy landholders expanding their wealth through hardnosed business? Is this a parable in praise of business? I seriously doubt it. I don't think Jesus or his hearers would have been particularly warm to these practices. The intent was not for his audience to esteem wealthy landowners or lift up business virtues. The intent was to teach what vigilant faithfulness looks like from examples common to peasant culture.

I know I haven't touched on every nuance in this story. I'll have more to say in a couple of posts. But first, I want to turn to the Parable of the Minas in Luke 19, which has some parallels with this parable but also significant differences. Then we will do some review.

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Theologians & Economists: Parable of the Talents (1)

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(After a month-long hiatus, we pick up this series again.)

In the previous post, I noted the problem of reading New Testament stories out of context and unwittingly inserting our economic context into the stories. The Parable of the Talents is frequently used to support stewardship and wise investment of our resources. There is one version in Matt 25:14-30 and another in Luke 19:12-28. Today we begin by looking at the Matthew version.

Cultural Context

First Century Palestine was not a capitalist market economy. It was an agricultural society where the idyllic vision of peasant life was having enough land to be self-sufficient. Trade, via barter, was to supplement certain aspects of life but trade played a subsidiary role.

This way of life was slowly disappearing in Jesus' day. Urbanization had been building, which meant someone had to grow the food for those who lived in the cities. Transporting crops and basic commodities from outlying areas into cities and shipments of commodities between regions became an increasingly important business. Agricultural demand transformed subsistence farming into cash-crop farming, undermining the peasant view of the ideal life.

The Romans levied taxes and fees on agricultural production. As much as 50% of produce could be collected in taxes. Justo Gonzalez writes in Faith and Wealth:

During the republic and the early years of the empire, most of these taxes were collected by tax farmers known as “publicans.” Since substantial capital was required, most publican entrepreneurs were rich members of equestrian class, who often joined in veritable holding companies. They contracted with the government to raise the taxes of a particular area and to collect a fee for this service. The fee, however, was only part of the profit. Since many agricultural taxes were collected in kind, publicans made large profits by reselling the goods collected or by hoarding them until the price rose. They also served the central government as its financial agents in the provinces, employing the goods and funds that they held in order to cover such expenses as salaries and supplies for the legions. Since all this was done by means of paper transactions, it saved much of the costly and dangerous transport of goods and money.

Little government bureaucracy was in place, and therefore publicans also served as government agents in managing public works and providing some postal service. Naturally, for this also they charged a fee. When a farmer could not pay his taxes, publicans would offer to lend him money and 12 to 48 percent. Such loans grew rapidly as interest and new tax liabilities accumulated, and eventually the land was confiscated by the publicans. Beyond these various legal means of profit, some publicans would also take advantage of the ignorance and powerlessness of taxpayers, assessing them more than they should or undervaluing their contributions. Thus the negative image of publicans in the Gospels was probably shared by much of the populace of the Roman provinces. (38)

Most peasants were in precarious situations. Paying all the taxes and fees might leave many without enough to survive. There was an endless game of hide and seek with peasants trying to conceal their actual production to minimize taxes. After a couple of years of bad crops or other hardships, a peasant might have to sell his land to large landholders and become a sharecropper or indentured servant. The elite thoroughly controlled the courts and usually were uncompromising in enforcing debt contracts.

Some peasants left their land and turned to banditry. K. C. Hanson and Douglas Oakman (Palestine in the Time of Jesus) suggest that most of these bands came and went within a couple of years. A few organized into long-running organizations, usually with a notable leader. They tended to operate near their place of origin and were frequently aided and supported by local peasants.

Kenneth Bailey notes that these communities tended to have two types of "the big man." One was the nobleman of the plains, who ran large agricultural operations. He was noted for his dignified status and great power. Concerning the estates of the wealthy landowners, Albert Harrill writes in Slaves in the New Testament:

“Especially in rural areas, apprehended runaway slaves and freeborn victims of kidnapping often found themselves thrown into the private slave prisons (ergastula) on the estates of wealthy landowners, never to be heard from again.” (12)

Harrill notes that the private prisons were dark and desperate places where the torture of slaves produced weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.

The other big man was the bandit leader who would swoop in from the hills and raid the agricultural estates. In folklore, the bandits were revered for their ruthless tactics and considerable bravado, taking what they wanted with impunity.

Scriptural Context

This parable in Matthew comes in Jesus' final discourse on eschatology at the Mount of Olives. In Chapter 24, Jesus warns that the end is coming. He exhorts his hearers to be watchful and faithful until the end. At the end of the chapter, he tells of a slave left in charge of his master's household, who, after his master leaves, begins to behave in a disreputable manner. When the master returns by surprise, the slave is discovered and suffers the consequences.

Chapter 25 contains three teachings. First, there is the Parable of the Ten Bridesmaids. Five correctly anticipate and prepare for their Groom's arrival, and five do not. Second comes the Parable of the Talents. Third comes the climactic "Sheep and Goats" judgment of the nations where some errantly believe they are in God's good graces while others are unaware they are in God's good graces and find out they are because they have lived out what God desires.

Questions

So here are a few questions as we reflect on how Jesus' peasant audience might have heard this story.

The master in the story is a "big man." Note that he has large sums of money to invest. What is his character and status?

How are the slaves investing the money? In addition to funding short-term cash flow problems in commerce, the primary purposes for lending were to finance the trade in commodities … in support of the cash-crop economy … and to lend to the poor, often in hopes of trapping them in debt and taking their land. How did the peasants likely view this source of income?

Note how the third slave describes his master's character. Does this characterization match a nobleman or a bandit? How does the slave's characterization square with the rest of the evidence we have about who the master is?

Matt 25:14-30

"For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; 15 to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. 16 The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. 17 In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. 18 But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master's money. 19 After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. 20 Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, 'Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.' 21 His master said to him, 'Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.' 22 And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, 'Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.' 23 His master said to him, 'Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.' 24 Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, 'Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; 25 so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.' 26 But his master replied, 'You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? 27 Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. 28 So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. 29 For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. 30 As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.' (NRSV)

So what do you think? I'll offer my thoughts in the next post.

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Theologians and Economists: Reading Scripture in Context

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In my previous post, I wrote that economics is not in the Bible. Many terms central to economics can't even be translated into Greek or Latin. Certainly, people of the Old and New Testament eras labored, traded, and used money, but they did not see what we would call economic activity as a semi-autonomous sphere of life to be studied and managed. It is tempting for us to read our modern economic framework back into the Scripture, especially when we see words and activities presented that has similarity to our context.

Christians of all political stripes fall prey to reading passages out of context to support current agendas. As this blog has pointed out, political left-leaning theologians have habitually projected current agendas back into Scripture. For example, concerning Jubilee, Jim Wallis writes in "God's Politics":

Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor,” and opened up his own ministry by proclaiming, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (which was a direct reference to the Jubilee Year in the Hebrew Scriptures where, periodically, the debts of the poor were canceled, slaves were set free, and land was redistributed for the sake of equity.) (15-16)

Jubilee 2000, the campaign for canceling debt for emerging nations, took Jubilee as its theme.

First, while some passages speak to debt cancellation, there is no mention of debt in the Leviticus 25 passage. Second, Leviticus 25:39-40 explicitly prohibits Israelites from taking each other as slaves. There were no "slaves" to set free if the Jubilee provisions had been followed. Third, the Jubilee land and labor provisions functioned similarly to a lease agreement. Land was sold based on the number of crops until the next Jubilee, when the land was returned to the seller. The same was true for labor. The "lease" simply expired. The land was not "redistributed for the sake of equity."

The re-institution of Jubilee in Jesus' day would have had profound socio-political consequences. By his time, the specifics of the Jubilee had become less significant to the Jews than its meaning of generally setting everything right. But the way the Jubilee Code is portrayed above is not consistent with what Leviticus says. It is distorted to serve a present economic agenda.

As we turn to the New Testament, many passages are similarly abused. In the next few posts, I want to do a case study on the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30 and its sister parable in Luke 19:12-28. These parables frequently come to mind when people are asked to think of Jesus' teaching on economic issues. Consistent with our capitalist ethic of investing and being productive, they are often used as stories of financial stewardship. Is that the case? Stay tuned.

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Theologians and Economists: Economics Isn't in the Bible

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I’ve recently been reading M. I. Finley’s classic The Ancient Economy. Early in the book, he explains that the Greek oikonomia (meaning “household management” and the word from which we get “economics”) dealt almost exclusively with the politics of managing the household. It had virtually nothing to do with what we would today call economics except in the banalest sense. He goes on to write:

Since revenues loom so large in the affairs of a state, it is not surprising that occasionally oikonomia also was used to mean the management of public revenues. The one Greek attempt at a general statement is the opening of the second book of the pseudo-Aristotelian Oikonomikos, and what is noteworthy about these half dozen paragraphs is not only their crashing banality but also their isolation in the whole surviving ancient writing. It was the French, apparently, who first made a practice of speaking of l’economie politique, and even they normally meant by it politics rather than economics until about 1750. By then a large body of writing had grown up on trade, money national income and economic policy, and in the second half of the eighteenth century “political economy” at last acquired its familiar, specialized sense, the science of the wealth of nations. The shorter “economics” is a late nineteenth-century innovation that did not capture the field until the publication of the first volume of Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics in 1890.

Marshall’s title cannot be translated into Greek or Latin. Neither can the basic terms, such as labour, production, capital, investment, income, circulation, demand, entrepreneur, utility, at least not in the abstract form required of economic analysis. In stressing this I am suggesting not that the ancients were like Moliere’s M. Jourdain, who spoke prose without knowing it, but that they in fact lacked the concept of “economy”, and, a fortiori, that they lacked the conceptual elements which together constitute what we call “the economy”. Of course they farmed, traded, manufactured, mined, taxed, coined, deposited and loaned money, made profits or failed in their enterprises. And they discussed these activities in their talk and their writing. What they did not do, however, was to combine these particular activities conceptually into a unit, Parsonian terms into “a differentiated sub-system of society”. Hence Aristotle, whose programme was to codify the branches of knowledge, wrote no Economics. Hence, too, the perennial complaints about the paucity and mediocrity of ancient “economic” writing rest of a fundamental misconception of what those writings are about. (20-21)

This means that there is no “economics” in the Bible. When biblical writers touch on topics we would normally associate with economic matters, they are not processing them through an economic model. They are processing them through the norms of Ancient Near East culture, Second Temple Judaism, or Greco-Roman culture. Kinship and politics were the driving institutions. Honor and shame, as well as patron and client relationships, were the primary guides in matters we would think of as economic.

That is not to say we can’t learn anything from Scripture about economic ethics. It does mean we need to be exceedingly cautious about inferring that free-market economics, liberationist redistribution, or distributive “small is beautiful” ideals (or any other economic models) somehow underlie teaching and events in the Bible as God’s transcendent model for economic behavior.

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Theologians and Economists: Remedial Justice

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In addition to distributive justice and commutative justice, there is also the issue of remedial justice. Remedial justice addresses just compensation and punitive action when malicious or careless damage has been done to life, liberty, or property. Someone must be reasonably certain that the fruits of their labor will not be taken by capricious or malevolent behavior if we expect them to invest their resources toward productive ends. Otherwise, why take the risk? It stifles the role God intends for us as co-creators and renders the idea of private property meaningless. Here are just a couple of passages addressing remedial justice in the Old Testament:

Lev 19:15 NRSV

You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor.

Deut. 16:19-20 NRSV

19 You must not distort justice; you must not show partiality; and you must not accept bribes, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of those who are in the right. 20 Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue, so that you may live and occupy the land that the LORD your God is giving you.

There are even specific penalties listed for various crimes:

Ex 22:1-2 NRSV

1 When someone steals an ox or a sheep, and slaughters it or sells it, the thief shall pay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep. The thief shall make restitution, but if unable to do so, shall be sold for the theft. 2 When the animal, whether ox or donkey or sheep, is found alive in the thief's possession, the thief shall pay double.

Ex 22:7-8 NRSV

7 When someone delivers to a neighbor money or goods for safekeeping, and they are stolen from the neighbor's house, then the thief, if caught, shall pay double. 8 If the thief is not caught, the owner of the house shall be brought before God, to determine whether or not the owner had laid hands on the neighbor's goods.

Ex 22:14-15 NRSV

14 When someone borrows an animal from another and it is injured or dies, the owner not being present, full restitution shall be made. 15 If the owner was present, there shall be no restitution; if it was hired, only the hiring fee is due.

These are just a few examples of God's laws for Israel, illustrating God's concern for remedial justice.

The lack of justice in Israel was a constant refrain with the prophets. Amos had one of the most eloquent pronouncements:

Amos 5:12-15 NRSV

12 For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins--you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate. 13 Therefore the prudent will keep silent in such a time; for it is an evil time. 14 Seek good and not evil, that you may live; and so the LORD, the God of hosts, will be with you, just as you have said. 15 Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the LORD, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.

Amos 5:21-24 NRSV

21 I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. 22 Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. 23 Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. 24 But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Jesus and the New Testament spent little time directly addressing governmental structures. Instead, Jesus encouraged us to go beyond simple justice equations like "…an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." Jesus instructed us to love our enemies, including respect for their possessions and health. If this ethic were widely shared, there would be no theft and violence and no need for remedial action in the first place. When Jesus met Zacchaeus, Zacchaeus seemed instantly to understand that he must make restitution for what he had stolen if he wanted to follow Jesus. When Jesus announced his ministry at Nazareth, he announced the Jubilee ... the ultimate in remedial economic action to prevent permanent economic bondage.

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Theologians and Economists: Commutative Justice

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Commutative Justice is about honest and just economic transactions. It is a major theme in both Testaments of the Bible. From the Old Testament:

Lev 19:11 NRSV

You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another.

Lev 19:13 NRSV

You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning.

Lev 19:35-36 NRSV

You shall not cheat in measuring length, weight, or quantity. You shall have honest balances, honest weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.

Deut 25:13-16 NRSV

13 You shall not have in your bag two kinds of weights, large and small. 14 You shall not have in your house two kinds of measures, large and small. 15 You shall have only a full and honest weight; you shall have only a full and honest measure, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you. 16 For all who do such things, all who act dishonestly, are abhorrent to the LORD your God.

Economic transactions of the time often involved grain, ointments, food, and precious metals. A scale consisting of a beam balanced on a stem, with trays of equal weight on each side, was used to determine weight and price. Weights were placed on one side, and the substance to be weighed was placed on the other. Standardized weights were removed until the two trays were in balance. Then a price was rendered. A dishonest merchant would use weights that would misrepresent quantities to his advantage.

Proverbs frequently warns against dishonest behavior and false scales and measures. The prophet Micah wrote:

Micah 6:11-12 NRSV

Can I tolerate wicked scales and a bag of dishonest weights? Your wealthy are full of violence; your inhabitants speak lies, with tongues of deceit in their mouths.

In the New Testament, Jesus said, "Let your word be 'Yes, Yes' or 'No, No'; anything more than this comes from the evil one." (Matthew 5:37) Upon meeting Jesus, Zacchaeus decided to refund anything he had overcharged people. (Luke 19:8) Paul, referring to the Old Testament, instructs, "…for the scripture says, 'You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain,' and, "The laborer deserves to be paid." (1 Tim 5:18) James warns the rich, "Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts." (James 5:4-5)

Our culture operates in a much more complex economic environment, and many of the issues we face were not specifically addressed in scripture. For instance, discrimination in hiring and promotion would fall under commutative justice. Nevertheless, honest and just economic transactions were a central concern of biblical ethics and must be a central part of any Christian economic ethic.

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Theologians and Economists: Distributive Justice

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Reading the legal codes in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, it is clear private property was taken for granted. One of the Ten Commandments was "Thou shall not steal." Numerous references exist for appropriate restitution when someone's property has been taken or damaged. Private property was central to Old Testament economic life.

However, ownership of private property was not absolute.

Deut. 15:4-5 NRSV

4 There will, however, be no one in need among you, because the LORD is sure to bless you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you as a possession to occupy, 5 if only you will obey the LORD your God by diligently observing this entire commandment that I command you today.

The law required that farmers not harvest to the edge of the field. (Leviticus 23:22) The Jubilee restricted the permanent land transfer. (Leviticus 25) Also, the Israelites were required to contribute to the Levites' care and certain governmental activities. There were communal issues that took precedence over property rights.

Nowhere in Scripture do we see a mandate for an equal distribution of income. Some argue that the jubilee code in Leviticus 25 was wealth redistribution. It was not. The jubilee put measures in place that prevented the permanent sale of agricultural land or permanent servitude. Debt was tightly constrained.

Some have used Acts 2:45 to suggest that the Early church intended communal ownership of property:

Acts 2:44-45 NRSV

44 All who believed were together and had all things in common; 45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.

These actions were done under extraordinary circumstances. The church was exploding. Many new believers would have been disowned by their families. Christians voluntarily pooled their resources to meet the need. This was not a model for ongoing church community.

The ideal world envisioned by peasants of Palestine in Jesus' day, as well as in the Old Testament era, was each peasant with his own land, free to enjoy the fruits of his labor. The common reality was domination by one political force or another.

Taxation and fees could amount to more than half of what peasants produced. The produce was hoarded in vast storehouses and either traded for other goods (enjoyed only by the wealthy) with distant nations or sold back to peasants and urban workers. Governments worked hard to replace barter exchange with monetary exchange, thus improving their ability to tax transactions. Wealthy landowners would find opportunities to loan peasants money when they hit hard times. But the peasants lived on such a razor-thin margin of production that they rarely had any surplus to repay. One more challenging time and they would lose their lands to the wealthy landowners and become their serfs. Revolts were generally led by revolutionaries and new empires who promised cancellation of debts and land redistribution, but once in power, they would resort to the same old tactics.

In this context, where an increase in productivity through technological innovation was unheard of, the economy was a zero-sum game. Someone's significant excess in wealth was understood to come at the expense of others. Unlike today, where most wealth exists in the form of productive assets like stock ownership or money made available for loans by placing it on deposit at the bank, wealth generally meant acquiring land (thus depriving someone else of land) and warehousing things like grain (thus depriving others of food.) Therefore, the concerns for the distribution of goods do not easily translate into a modern economy.

Seemingly, God desires to have billions of Adams working their own "gardens." God created all of us to be stewards of God's resources. When all goods are held in common, productivity and creativity, tend to drop to the level of the laziest and most incompetent. There is no incentive to work harder. Any increased productivity merely accrues to the slackers. Private property encourages the conscientious use of resources to their maximum benefit. Therefore, the most economically productive arraignment is private property. Still, God's mandate that there "be no one in need among you" checks productivity as our only value.

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Theologians and Economists: Economic Justice

(Today, we return to this series after a two-week hiatus due to duties with the Presbyterians. :-) )

[Series Index]

In recent posts, I've been suggesting some biblical themes that need to be a part of deliberations on theology and economics. God created humanity for dominion. It is our mission. Our relationship to material things is to either be stewards or forgo their use. God reigns over creation, and we are God's vice-regents.

Sin entered the world, and our mission now includes God's mission of redemption. Our primary role in redemption is to live out the Kingdom in our time proleptically, remaining aware that we live in a time when the Kingdom is not fully realized. The idea of shalom is probably the nearest thing we have to sum up the nature of the Kingdom of God.

Contrary to the practice of ancient cultures, God seems to desire that each person in the community participate in stewardship of the world. Private property is simply assumed, and God gave practices like the Jubilee as safeguards to protect ownership of agricultural property allotted to the people. Perpetual indebtedness and servitude were thwarted in God's plan. Yet even with private property, there was the injunction that the poor be provided for.

Also planted deep within the Judeo-Christian ethos is the idea of progress. The things God creates are good but unfinished. We participate with God in transforming matter, energy, and data from less useful forms into more useful forms. We are not merely protecting a status quo but building a Kingdom, bringing everything to its fullness.

I want to turn our attention now to economic justice. When discussing economic justice, we essentially talk about three justice aspects.

1. Distributive Justice – This addresses how capital and goods are distributed throughout the society.

2. Commutative Justice – This addresses the truthfulness of parties to an economic exchange.

3. Remedial Justice – This addresses just compensation and punitive action when there has been malicious or careless damage done to life, liberty or property.

Next, I want to briefly examine these three aspects of economic justice and the evidence for them in the Bible.

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Theologians & Economists: Linear Time and Progress

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So far, we have noted the Hebrews' unique cosmology and notion of decentralized stewardship. But another peculiarity about Hebrew thought contributes directly to economic behavior: Linear time and progress.

Ancient Near East culture had a cyclical view of time. Time moved in repeating patterns. Worship and daily life were about conforming to the gods' established patterns.

The Hebrew cosmology suggests that the world was created incomplete but with an end in mind. God created humanity and instructed them to fill the earth and exercise dominion- bringing it to its potential. The idea that time is a sequence of non-repeating events moving toward an end is nascent in Genesis cosmology.

With the fall of humanity came the promise of redemption and, ultimately, a new creation. The specificity of this plan unfolds throughout the Old Testament. God intends to use Israel as a magnet to draw all nations to God's self. Israel fails in its mission and awaits a day when God will redeem them. In the centuries before Christ, many championed obedience to the covenant as a way to speed God's action. As Rodney Stark has written, they were processing through time, anticipating redemption.

Jesus enters the picture announcing the arrival of the Kingdom of God but not in a way the Jews expect. The redemptive mission is not just for Israel but for all of humanity and creation. But for our purposes, what is critical is to realize the shift in perspective related to time. Rather than looking backward to Moses and living according to a set of covenantal rules and practices, the view shifts forward to the consummation of the Kingdom. The ethics and reality of the future are to be lived as if they were in the present as best we can. There is a sense of giving witness to God as Israel intended, but there is a more active, explicitly outward-directed mission. We are not only passively processing toward the Kingdom but also actively progressing toward the Kingdom, praying that God's will be done on earth as in heaven.

Scholar uses an analogy to describe the progression of time for the Hebrews. Imagine navigating a river or lake. The Hebrew perspective was one of being in a rowboat rowing the oars with our back toward our destination and our eyes toward what we are leaving as a reference point. We tend to view time as though we are in a canoe, orienting ourselves by what is on the horizon in front of us. All this means is that we are in a story (a progression of events), God is in control of those events, and we are participants in unfolding those events. The Enlightenment/Modernist heresy keeps the idea of progress and participating in shaping human events while evicting God from the equation.

Economic development studies show that time orientation and confidence that life can be other than it is now are two of the most critical factors in catalyzing economic development. I read recently about a Christian economic development team working with Indians in Guatemala. They assisted in building grain storage facilities for the Indians. But these Indians had such a fatalistic view of reality that they simply did nothing when bins needed repairs to keep rodents out and the grain in. It was then that the mission workers began to preach regularly about God's power and sovereignty. Some began to catch the vision of what God is about, and the community was transformed.

The idea that we are progressing to an end and that change is possible is so much a part of our reality it is like talking about water to a fish. When surveys are done of poor people in developing nations today, the most frequently identified concern is not material need. It is hopelessness and fear … no sense of progress or power to affect events.

While we may not always agree about what constitutes appropriate progress and what end we should have in mind, the idea that there should be progress toward an end is deeply in the Judeo-Christian heritage.

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Theologians and Economists: Decentralized Stewardship

[Series Index]

We have noted the peculiar cosmology of the Hebrews compared to the Ancient Near East (ANE) cultures. Another peculiarity is the construal of property rights in the Bible, particularly regarding land and labor.

The idea of private property rights wasn’t foreign to ANE culture. Records dating back to at least the late third century B.C.E. spell out rudimentary property rights. Of course, what we think of as economic concerns were thoroughly embedded in kinship and politics. These societies were ruled by a tiny but powerful elite who claimed supreme sovereignty over the land and tended to extract excess wealth to fund the ruler’s projects. That made property rights precarious by modern standards. Various types of servitude and slavery deprived significant portions of the population of the basic right to the fruits of their own labor.

With the arrival of the Hebrews, we see concerns for property rights in the Pentateuch similar to those we see elsewhere in the ANE. The Ten Commandments list prohibitions against stealing and covetousness. The Old Testament simply takes property rights for granted. But we also see some interesting innovations.

While ANE societies had kings who were seen as representatives of the gods (if not gods themselves) and sovereign over the land, the law of the Hebrews provided no such earthly representative. God was directly sovereign over the land. In Leviticus 25:23, regarding the Jubilee, God says, “The land must not be sold permanently because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants.” “Sales” of agricultural land were more accurately leases set to expire at the next Jubilee when the land reverted to the original owner. The Jubilee made each family a permanent tenant of the land. Similarly, all servitude expired at each Jubilee, as did all debts. Slavery among the Israelites was forbidden.

Along with this stewardship came a variety of responsibilities in Old Testament Law. It was presumed that there would always be those who were in need. Farmers were to leave the edges of the field to be gleaned. Special offerings administered by the Levites were to be taken to provide for the poor. Other provisions protected the poor as well as the general admonition to be generous toward them.

The Jubilee made the Israelite families and individuals directly accountable to God. No divinely appointed ruler acted on God’s behalf. It was a radical decentralization of the control over property and an elevation of each Israelite family to stewardship over God’s resources.

In The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Harvard historian David Landes writes:

… The Hebrew hostility to autocracy, even their own, was formed in Egypt and the desert: was there ever a more stiff-necked people? Let me cite two examples, where the response to a popular initiative is directly linked to the sanctity of possessions. When the priest Korach leads a revolt against Moses in the desert, Moses defends himself against the charges of usurpation by saying, “I have not taken one ass from them, nor have I wronged one of them” (Numbers 16:15). Similarly, when the Israelites, now established in the Land, call for a king, the prophet Samuel grants their wish but warns them of the consequences: a king, he tells them, will not be like him. “Whose ox have I taken, or whose ass have I taken?” (1 Samuel 12:3).

This tradition, which set the Israelites apart from any of the kingdoms around and surely did much to earn them the hostility of nearby rulers – who needs such troublemakers? – tended to get lost in Christianity when that community of faith became a church, especially once that Church became the official, privileged religion of an autocratic empire. One cannot well bite the hand that funds. Besides, the word was not getting out, for the Church early decided that only qualified people, certain clerics for example, should know the Bible. The Good Book, with its egalitarian laws and morals, its prophetic rebukes of power and exaltation of the humble, invited indiscipline among the faithful and misunderstanding with the secular authorities. Only after censorship and edulcoration could it be communicated to the laity. So that it was not until the appearance of such heretical sects as the Waldensians  (Waldo, c. 1175), the Lollards (Wiclif, c. 1376), Lutherans (1519 on), and Calvinists (mid-sixteenth), with their emphasis on personal religion and the translation of the Bible into the vernacular, that this Judaic-Christian tradition entered explicitly into the European political consciousness, by way of reminding rulers that they held their wealth and power of God, and the on condition of good behavior, An inconvenient doctrine.

Yet Western Medieval Christianity did come to condemn the pretensions of earthly rulers – lesser monarchs, to be sure, than the emperors of Rome. (The Eastern Church never talked back to the Caesars of Byzantium.) It thereby implicitly gave protection to private property. As the Church’s own claims to power increased, it could not but emphasize the older Judaic principle that the real owner of everything was the Lord above, and the newer Christian principle that the pope was his vicar here below. Earthly rulers were not free to do as they pleased, and even the Church, God’s surrogate on earth, could not flout rights and take at will. The elaborate paperwork that accompanied the transfer of gifts of the faithful bore witness to this duty of good practice and proper procedure.

All of this made Europe very different from civilizations around. (34-35)

The idea of decentralized stewardship was a central component of Judeo-Christian values. Families and individuals are to participate with God in their own provision through the resources entrusted to them and to participate with God in the provision of others who, because of stage of life or disability, cannot provide for themselves.

Are there other implications you see from the Old Testament law and the Jubilee?

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Theologians and Economists: Creation Implications

[Series Index]

Today we turn a corner in our discussion of theologians and economists. Most economists (academic ones, anyway) live and work in positive economics … they study the world as it is and attempt to model how economic realities work. Theology is largely a study of normative behavior … we want to discern how we ought to behave. When we engage this task with regard to economics, we have entered into normative economics. Positive economics can't answer "ought" questions but can often give useful information about what happens if we behave in certain ways. So if we want to discuss normative economics from a theological perspective, where might we begin? How about at the beginning?

Something peculiar happened a few millennia ago in the Ancient Near East. Cosmologies of these ancient cultures were quite similar. The gods emerge from some primordial stuff, form the world, and then create human beings as servants subject to the gods' capricious whims. But then the Hebrews came along.

The Hebrew cosmology taught that there was only one god without origin and by whom everything else was created and given its function. It taught that human beings, far from being slaves to capricious gods, had been crowned with glory and honor … made rulers over the works of God's hands, and everything was put under their feet. (Psalm 8) God gave humanity dominion over the Earth and instructed them to fill it… to bring it to its full potential. (Gen 1) We are told that human beings were to "care for the garden." (Gen 2) When we take in the full sweep of the biblical narrative, we see that the story begins in a garden and ends in a city

Several things can be gleaned from this astonishing new story:

• God is the owner and sustainer of all that exists. When it comes to material things, we have two roles we may adopt: steward or foregoer. Human beings are accountable to the owner for using the owner's (God's) creation.
• God does not provide all that we need in the form that we need it. We participate in our own provision. We transform matter, energy, and data from less useful to more useful forms.
• As "gardeners," we are neither parasites destroying the Earth nor forest rangers protecting the Earth from all disturbance. As Darrell Cosden says, the Earth is our habitat and our work's subject.
• As we move later into the Christian narrative, it becomes clear that redemption is not about rescuing individuals from eternal suffering. Redemption is converting the world into the shalom-filled vision God originally initiated and recovering humanity's role within that world. Personal salvation is about being saved into the movement that prays and works for "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done" as we actively wait for the consummation of the new creation.

We will move to other texts in the next posts, but what other implications do you see for normative economics coming from Judeo-Christian cosmology?

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Theologians and Economists: A Mission of Stewardship and Redemption

[Series Index]

I wrote in the previous post that shalom is God’s vision for us. So what is our mission in relation to the vision that God has given us? I suggest that it is a twofold mission: stewardship and redemption. (I’m riffing here on John Stackhouse’s formulations.)

Stewardship

Our mission of stewardship is in response to two mandates. First, there is the cultural mandate. We were created to be co-regents with God over creation. We are called to exercise dominion … to fill the earth and bring it to its fullness. The cultural mandate includes the establishment and enrichment of human civilization. The biblical narrative begins in a garden and ends in a garden city. The cultural mandate includes both environmental care and economic action.

The second mandate is the Great Commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Here is the core ethical mandate. All we do in our stewardship and relationships is to be grounded in these two commands. It was true before the fall, it will be true in the new creation, and it is true now. Stewardship is the exercise of dominion guided by these ethical commands. It is what we were made for.

Redemption

Fallen humanity has gone the way of Cain and manufactured worlds that offer illusory meaning apart from God. God is on a mission of redemption to shatter the deception and bring the whole world … all that will come …back into his household. He has chosen us to be messengers and witnesses of his transformative work. We’ve been given two redemption mandates.

First, Jesus says we are to love one another. The Kingdom of God breaks into the present from the future through communities of people who live according to the reality of the future Kingdom as best they can in the present. That life together gives a living portrait to the rest of the world, however imperfect it may be, of what God envisions. The community gives witness to shalom both in its own life and in its pursuit of shalom for the world through intercession and active engagement.

The second mandate is the Great Commission. We are sent into the world to reveal God’s vision of shalom, invite others into the Kingdom of God through repentance, and enlist them in the lifelong mission of stewardship and redemption.

Economic Implications

The challenge for economic reflection is figuring out how this vision and mission translate into practical ethical guidance for evaluating economic behavior in our time. We turn to that now.

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Theologians & Economists: A Vision of Shalom

[Series Index]

Earlier in this series, I said human beings build worlds to inhabit and infuse them with meaning. As God's image-bearers, that is simply what we do. But our world-building enterprise has become corrupted. Because of sin, there is always a mixture of goodness and idolatry in all we create. God's mission is about the redemption of humanity and the created order … the establishment of the new creation. That redemption includes redemption of economic activity.

As we begin to reflect on economics theologically, we must be cautious about the narratives we bring to Scripture. Three I have noted are:

1. Substituting Modernist visions for the Kingdom of God: Achievement of personal autonomy or endless improvement of humanity through application of "objective" reason by benevolent experts.
2. Viewing the economy as a family/household writ large, including the idea that there is a global or societal "household manager."
3. Uncritically applying the ethics of the Bible's zero-sum economic context to our context.

So what is the best starting point for thinking theologically about economic issues? I would suggest we need to look at the biblical vision and mission: Shalom through stewardship and redemption.

Shalom

If there is one word that best sums up the idea of the coming Kingdom of God, it is probably shalom. We typically equate shalom with the English word "peace." Unfortunately, we often identify peace simply as the absence of war or anxiety. Shalom means so much more. Here are just a few ways shalom is used in the Old Testament. (The words representing shalom are in bold.)

Absence of War

Joshua 9:15 (NRSV)

And Joshua made peace with them, guaranteeing their lives by a treaty; and the leaders of the congregation swore an oath to them.

Harmonious relationships

1 Samuel 16:4-5 (NRSV)

4 Samuel did what the LORD commanded, and came to Bethlehem. The elders of the city came to meet him trembling, and said, "Do you come peaceably?" 5 He said, "Peaceably; I have come to sacrifice to the LORD; sanctify yourselves and come with me to the sacrifice."

Personal welfare of people and animals

Genesis 37:14 (NRSV)

So he said to him, "Go now, see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock; and bring word back to me."

Prosperity

Jeremiah 33:9 (NRSV)

And this city shall be to me a name of joy, a praise and a glory before all the nations of the earth who shall hear of all the good that I do for them; they shall fear and tremble because of all the good and all the prosperity I provide for it.

Justice

Zechariah 8:16-17 (NRSV)

16 These are the things that you shall do: Speak the truth to one another, render in your gates judgments that are true and make for peace, 17 do not devise evil in your hearts against one another, and love no false oath; for all these are things that I hate, says the LORD.

Peace of mind

Psalms 119:165 (NRSV)

Great peace have those who love your law; nothing can make them stumble.

These are just a few samples of shalom's many shades of meaning. There are other more nuanced instances as well. All seem to point toward wholeness, wellness, and harmony.

There are three more passages I want to highlight. These passages show the centrality of shalom to God's vision for humanity. The first passage is the Priestly Prayer, and the other two are messianic prophecies.

Numbers 6:24-26 (NRSV)

24 The LORD bless you and keep you;
25 the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
26 the LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

Isaiah 9:6-7 (NRSV)

6 For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
7 His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time onward and forevermore.
The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.

Ezekiel 37:24-28 (NRSV)

24 My servant David shall be king over them; and they shall all have one shepherd. They shall follow my ordinances and be careful to observe my statutes. 25 They shall live in the land that I gave to my servant Jacob, in which your ancestors lived; they and their children and their children's children shall live there forever; and my servant David shall be their prince forever. 26 I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them; and I will bless them and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary among them forevermore. 27 My dwelling place shall be with them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 28 Then the nations shall know that I the LORD sanctify Israel, when my sanctuary is among them forevermore.

Throughout the New Testament, Jesus and others repeatedly say things like "Grace and peace to you."

In all its fullness, shalom is probably the best word, to sum up what God intends for creation. At the core of shalom is everyone and everything being in a healthy relationship with God and each other. While shalom is not an economic concept, economic issues are integral. God's primary mission for us is to care for creation and enhance it in ways that reflect what God values. We build our home in this world as we fill the earth. The development and distribution of resources and goods are integral to God's mission for humanity. There can be no shalom without economics that honors God.

I suggest that shalom is the general standard for theologically evaluating an economic system. Yet we are always cognizant that, on this side of the consummation of the new creation, no economic system will achieve shalom. Therefore, in critiquing, it is insufficient to show that an economic system doesn't measure up to shalom. All economic systems will fail this measure. The question is performance relative to other possibilities this side of the fulfillment of the new creation.

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Theologians & Economists: The Economic World of the Bible Versus Now

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A major challenge for theological reflection on economics is the distance in time and space between First Century Palestine and Twenty-First Century America. We tend to read our context back into Scripture. We assume people pretty much understood life as we do. That may be harmless with some issues, but it can profoundly distort reflection on economic issues. So let's highlight some of the key economic contours that shaped the First Century world.

Most advanced agrarian societies in the ancient world were power pyramids. Wealth flowed up from the masses through a pyramid of hierarchical structures to a tiny minority at the top. First Century Roman culture was no different.

Most of the population lived at subsistence levels, with 80-90% engaged in agriculture. Some peasants had their own land, but many were sharecroppers on the estates of the elite. Landholdings were small and were much less fruitful per parcel of land than today's farms. Between half and two-thirds of the peasant's production was extracted via taxes, fees, tribute, or outright extortion.

Most agricultural communities unaffiliated with large estates were small and self-contained. Roads and vehicles were of poor quality and not conducive to significant vehicular activity. Transportation of goods was very limited, and the minimal infrastructure primarily served to transport produce out of the community, not bring goods in. Each family produced what they consumed in clothing, food, and shelter. Families and kin provided for each other as needed, and barter was the preferred mode of exchange when exchange was needed.

Needs beyond the basic necessities were mostly met through the patron and client relationship. A person of means would lavishly aid someone, indebting the recipient (the client) to himself (the patron). The client would then forever be in the patron's debt and show honor by doing the patron's bidding when called upon. The client would bring any clients and family he had under the patron's patronage. As demonstrations of their power and benevolence, patrons routinely take care of matters for their clients, creating further indebtedness. Sometimes patrons were unable or ill-equipped to address a particular problem, in which case brokers might be employed to negotiate services between patrons of a similar social class. Status was measured by the number of clients one amassed.

Cities were oppressive, and mortality was high. The cities existed to serve the elite. The various artisans and workers in the city were there to carry out the work of wealthy patrons and masters. There was some exchange, but primarily to take care of basic needs and no more. Excessive production and profitability only brought more extractive measures from those higher in the social pyramid. Slaves and laborers died young by the score, but there was always more to bring in from the country.

In Palestine in the Time of Jesus, K. C. Hanson and Douglas E. Oakman point out that while we see several distinct institutions in society, ancient cultures saw only two: kinship and politics. Other concerns like religion, economics, or education were part of these two institutions. They sum up the core focus of economics in the First Century nicely:

The modern word economy itself comes from two Greek words, oikos and nomia, meaning “household management.” The modern word indicates the core concern of the ancients with provisioning and sustaining the family and the household. In agrarian societies, though, no family was and island to itself. Such societies always had elites who dominated other families; hence the larger economy was a political economy. (95)

Economics for the peasants was a matter of provisioning the household through labor and barter exchange with a few close members of the community. Economics for the wealthy was primarily an exercise in determining how to extract the surplus from others' work to sustain your estate. There was some trade, primarily of agricultural goods, but traded goods affected only a tiny minority of society.

In economic terms, this all means that productivity, the production level per worker, was perceived to be within a fixed range. To get more production meant getting more workers. Getting more workers consumed more resources. Production and consumption were in a relatively constant range.

There were no incentives for the poor to innovate or invest in more productive methods. Meaningful property rights didn't exist. Any excessive production merely invited the attention of the powerful, who would extract the surplus in support of their armies, the construction of ostentatious edifices, and the pursuit of luxurious lifestyles.

The elites also had no incentive to increase productivity. If more goods were needed, more lands could be conquered, more people enslaved, and higher taxes could be levied. Thus, while the Romans may have excelled in inventing new weaponry, water delivery systems, and construction, virtually all these innovations benefited the elite with little contribution to the greater society.

Rome was not unique. This general arrangement has been the norm for advanced agrarian societies for millennia (and is still present in many developing nations today.) The consequence was negligible economic growth. It took thousands of years for annual per capita gross domestic product to rise from about $90 (1990 purchasing power parity dollars) to $109 at Christ's birth. Between then and 1750, it rose to $178. In 2000, it was more than $6,600!

Therefore, the economy of biblical culture was a zero-sum game. The only way someone got ahead was at the expense of others. The idea that someone could become not only two or three times as productive as the norm, but ten times, fifty times, one hundred times … and more … was unfathomable. The idea that people might specialize in doing a narrow task to earn an income that would then be used to trade in a monetary economy with a virtually unlimited number of people from around the globe who have specialized in doing other specific tasks was also utterly foreign. The simple idea that we might be able to invest our time and energy in improving our material lot with relative confidence that powerful people will not come and seize what we have produced was a rarely realized dream.

The two things that dominate our economy today are technological innovation and trade … two unimaginable things in the day of the New Testament. The economy is no longer a zero-sum game. Instead of becoming wealthy by taking from others, people can become wealthier because they become more productive. Instead of hoarding wealth in selfish contempt toward others, amassing wealth and investing it creates a productive capacity that benefits the community. The question is, What would Jesus have taught if he had come into a world where people could be empowered to develop economically productive lives and engage with countless others in mutually beneficial exchange?

I sense that many theologians who speak on economic issues have never taken a basic class in economics or even tried to educate themselves about rudimentary economic realities. Consequently, biblical ethics from an era of ancient agrarian societies is uncritically applied to a world that has radically changed. Combine this with an inappropriate tendency to see society as the family/household writ large and productive discussions between theologians and economists are all but impossible.

(For an excellent overview of the economy in Jesus' day, see Hanson and Oakman's Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflict, 2nd ed., particularly Chapter 4. Relatively concise with helpful direction to other resources.)

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Theologians and Economists: The Impact of Modernism

[Series Index]

Though we talk about the arrival of a postmodern era, Modernism still has considerable influence in our discussions of theology and economics. Modernism was built on human autonomy and endless human progress (defined largely as material happiness) through the application of reason. I see two general influences that distort Christian reflection on these issues.

First, there is the goal of achieving personal autonomy. Barry Goldwater, one of the architects of the modern conservative movement, wrote at the beginning of The Conscience of a Conservative in 1964:

“Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices that he must make; they cannot be made by any other human being. … Conservatism’s first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?”

Freedom is critical. There is wisdom here that Christians can affirm. But “always” is a pretty inclusive term. Furthermore, some see a corollary in this reasoning: we have no responsibility for others. Does this libertarian pursuit of personal freedom ever run counter to other ethical imperatives Christians share? Probably so.

Over the past couple of generations, many conservative Christian circles have concluded that traditional institutions like the family are under attack by cultural elites in government, education, and the media. That has made conservative Christians common allies with those who oppose large government for economic reasons. Considerable effort has been made to wed these two small government factions together. Many have suggested that this wedding has led conservative Christians to unwittingly adopt something approximating economic libertarianism … more by osmosis than by careful theological reflection. That is likely true.

Second, there is the idea of conquering nature (even human nature) through reason and science and managing it toward higher purposes. John Stapleford describes this Modernist impulse in Bulls, Bears, and Golden Calves:

[There is] faith in continual improvements in human nature. As people became more educated and as more of their basic physical needs are met, it is argued, they will be more community minded, more likely to make decisions on the basis of what is best for society rather than for themselves and their families.” (68-69)

While material abundance has indeed blossomed, there has been a growing sense that the abundance has come at the cost of too many other important values like community and the environment. Rising prosperity has hardly made people more community minded. But new solutions are still in terms of rational experts managing society toward more progressive objectives. The belief is still in continuous improvement of human nature and society. The framing language is “stewardship in pursuit of the common good.” We have been given the responsibility for creation care … and “we” frequently refers to humanity as a being with a collective mind rationally managing toward these outcomes.

Look closely at the word “economics.” Early nineteenth-century thinkers adopted the phrase “political economy” to describe the science they wanted to create. Economy comes from the Greek word oikonomia, “household management.” These thinkers were taken with Greco-Roman sages who instructed others in household management. Their perspective was society as the household writ large, with positivistic analysis giving the wisdom to manage society toward more progressive outcomes. Later, the field became known as economics.

This extension of “the household” to all of society is also widespread in Christian thought. There is confusion over what a steward is. Paul Heyne* wrote that “steward” is frequently used to translate two very different Greek words. There is epitropos, a person who is a guardian of something belonging to another. Then there is the oikonomos, the household or estate manager with authority over all operations of the household, managing affairs to achieve the best outcome for the householder. One could conceivably have many guardians or administrators caring for designated responsibilities, but there can only be one household manager. In Christian thought, the two have been combined.

Heyne frequently used two traffic networks to illustrate an important difference: Air traffic control versus the transportation network of any city. Air traffic controllers manage each vehicle, directing their every move toward an outcome that is in the common good of the traffic. There are a relatively small number of vehicles to track. This is similar to the role of the household manager.

There is no controller for a city’s transportation network. People move as they please without consultation of a controller or discernment with other commuters. That is not to say it is anarchy. Some rules govern behavior while in transit. There are referees (the police) who enforce the rules. But no controller manages commuters’ behavior toward a common good. There is no way to have a ground traffic controller or household manager in such an environment. This is similar to the modern economic environment.

Many Christians claiming the mantle of Modernist critic have correctly chastised the idea of progress through economic growth alone and “value free” management of the economy. But unwittingly, they have retained the assumption that the economy is the household writ large. Instead of managing society toward economic growth, Christian ethics allegedly tells us that the “household manager” … who is never explicitly identified but seems to be a rational collective mind or a community of experts … should now manage society toward the common good.

The idea of a society governed by a household manager is simply untenable, and offering critiques and solutions as if it were so unhelpful. The idea that society can be viewed as the household writ large is deeply steeped in Enlightenment-Modernist ideology and distorts Christian reflection on economic issues.

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Theologians & Economists: Economics and God's Mission

[Series Index]

Human beings were created to build a world. According to Genesis, humanity is to exercise dominion over the earth … to multiply and fill the earth. Psalm 8 declares.

3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
4 what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?

5 Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.
6 You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet,
7 all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.  (Ps 8:3-8, NRSV)

We are creators in the Creator's image and vice-regents over creation. We are participants in our own provision and the provision for our habitat. This is essential to who we are as humans.

But Genesis tells us that this vision has been marred. With the fall, the relationship between God and humanity, human beings with human beings, and human beings with the created order is corrupted. The ground that should give abundance yields produces only through toilsome labor. Relationships deteriorate. Cain kills his brother Abel without remorse. Upon being sent into exile, Genesis records:

Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. (Gen 4:16, NRSV)

"Nod" means "wandering." The imagery is of Cain settling in the land of wandering. An act of futility if ever there was one. The passage goes on to say:

Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and named it Enoch after his son Enoch. (Gen 4:17-18, NRSV)

While today we see society as a collection of social institutions, cultural anthropologists tell us that ancient cultures saw only two institutions: kinship and politics. All other institutions are bound up in these. Note what Cain does: He begins a kinship line and builds the first city. "Enoch" means "initiated." Cain is initiating a world in the absence of God. The remainder of Genesis 4 tells of the emergence of animal husbandry, music, and metalworking. While these things all seem to be a natural expression of human creativity, they are emerging in the land of Nod, the land of wandering.

Cain's banishment creates a dilemma. As a human being, Cain's impulse is to build. But the impulse was designed to work with God and his vision for the world. Cut off from God, efforts at building a true home are futile. Two choices present themselves. He could return to God and be restored to a truly meaningful existence (but he refuses), or he can try to construct a meaningful life apart from a God (which is futile.) So he settles for what humanity has done ever since: Diversion. We join together to construct a mutually reinforcing reality giving a sense of meaning and order, and altars at which to worship, diverting our attention from our true dilemma:

Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. (Rom 1:20-23, NRSV)

But this is not the end of the story.

Nearly four millennia ago, there was a city in Canaan called Shalem. The earliest reference to the city was 1850 B.C.E. in Egyptian texts. Baal was the Near East's predominant god, and each locality had its own version of Baal. Shalem was the Baal for its region. Cities of the Near East like Shalem weren't just large communities. They were the very incarnation of the deity worshiped. Shalem symbolized Venus, the evening star. It conveyed the idea of completeness and fulfillment, the culmination of the day. In the Bible, we first encounter Shalem in Genesis 14:18, where the priest-king Melchizedek comes out to bless Abraham. (The anglicized version of the name is spelled "Salem.”)

Ancient texts often called the city Urushalim, meaning "foundation of Shalem." David annexed the area of Urushalim to Israel after Israel had conquered Canaan. He made the city his capital and altered the name. He took the first syllable of God's name, "Yah," from Yahweh and added it to the front of the name: Yahurushalim. The anglicized name for God is Jehovah, and the first syllable is "Je." Therefore, the anglicized name of the city becomes "Jerusalem." (Shalom may have evolved from the Canaanite word "shalem.")*

"Shalem" originally meant completion and fulfillment through human idolatry. God enters the picture and infuses a new vision of completion and fulfillment. God adds his name to humanity's highest expression of world-building defiance toward him (Urushalim) and transforms it into God's foundation of completion and fulfillment (Jerusalem). What is the imagery for the newly restored order at the end of the biblical narrative in Revelation? The New Jerusalem!

As we reflect on economics, there are three things that I think need to be kept in mind:

1. The human trait of building worlds and infusing them with meaning is irrepressible. Transforming matter, energy, and data from less useful states into more useful states, and exchanging with each other, is integral to the world-building enterprise. It is of God and it is a holy thing.

2. Because of sin, human societies are always a result of a world-building impulse that has become disoriented and corrupted. There is always a mixture of legitimacy and idolatry.

3. God’s mission is about the redemption of humanity and the created order … the establishment of the new creation. That redemption includes redemption of economic activity as one piece of our world-building mission.

(* For more on Shalem's transformation, see Robert C. Linthicum, City of God. City of Satan: A Biblical Theology of the Urban Chruch, Grand Rapids, MI:  Zondervan, 1991, p. 24-26.

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Theologians & Economists: The Rise of Unprecedented Prosperity (2)

[Series Index]

(Continued)

Economic Growth

When most people think of economic disparity, they usually think in terms of income. Income is correlated with other factors that empower us to survive and thrive. What can we say about per capita income on a historical basis?

Comparing income across eras is difficult. Inflation and other variables make direct comparison impossible. Comparing contemporary currency-based economies to barter economies will not work either. Economic historians have developed a concept called "purchasing power parity" (PPP) to aid in this comparative analysis. The value of a dollar at a fixed point in time is chosen, and the value of income at all other points is pegged to the purchasing power of the fixed dollar. We will use a PPP measure of "1990 International Dollars" (I$). Annual per capita Gross Domestic Product (the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a given country in a given period, usually a year) will be used as a proxy for income.

Not all economists agree on how to achieve parity between the present and past eras. Angus Maddison, one of the foremost authorities on this topic, suggests that I$400 per capita is a subsistence-level income typical of subsistence living before the industrial revolution. However, economist Brad Delong, who has done his own analysis, claims:

“A large proportion of our high standard of living today derives not just from our ability to more cheaply and productively manufacture the commodities of 1800, but from our ability to manufacture whole new types of commodities, some of which do a better job of meeting needs that we knew we had back in 1800, and some of which meet needs that were unimagined back in 1800.” (Brad DeLong)

Therefore, DeLong puts historic subsistence living at I$90. Both scholars end up with similar income estimates in recent eras.

Another difference is that while Maddison has tended to focus his analysis on the past two millennia, DeLong has analyzed more ancient eras. Either way, when you plot their data over the past few millennia on a chart, you get this:

DeLong reports that it took from 10,000 BCE until 1750 for per capita GDP to double from I$90 to I$178. (I$109 in year 1 CE.) Maddison says a per capita GDP of I$467 in 1 CE and I$616 in 1700. The following chart shows their estimates between 1600 and 2003:

You can see that growth accelerates beginning in the early nineteenth century. Many have suggested that the industrial revolution began not long after 1750, and it is true that many inventions came into being not long after that. However, there was a lag of a few decades between the advent of various technologies and their placement into productive use. Maddison argues for a beginning point of 1820 (as do other economic historians.) Regardless, remember that the world population grew sevenfold between 1750 to 2010 as this explosion in per capita income unfolded. Taken together, we can see that worldwide per capita income growth is astounding. But how broadly spread is it?

Through regional analysis, Angus Maddison offers us some powerful insights into the recent global economic expansion. The popular history of the world is that through colonization, the West European nations enriched themselves by robbing other regions of the world of their resources, thus driving them into destitution. Let's take a look at the impact of colonization and the industrial revolution on those regions outside Western Europe, West European Offshoots (like the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), and Japan:

Every region has experienced magnitudes of growth since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It is particularly true after World War II. The former USSR data is a bit distorted on the graph because there was a significant drop in per capita income during the 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. However, growth has returned over the past decade. Russia's per capita GDP has grown nearly 25% in the three years after 2003.

The truly bleak portion of the picture is Africa. Africa was ahead of Asia in growth throughout the twentieth century until the 1980s. The inability to establish sound governments and the AIDS epidemic have stagnated Africa's growth and even reversed it in several sub-Saharan nations. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the few stagnated or declining regions globally, but this reversal did not begin until the 1980s.

The fact is that there has been a significant improvement in the absolute per capita income of nations outside the West. And not only are people not getting poorer outside the West, but non-Western emerging economies have also been growing faster than Western economies. The recent recession has sent most of this temporarily into reverse, but emerging nations like China, India, and Brazil have been weathering the recession better than the U. S.

(Source: The Economist)

However, as this chart below shows, there is a lot of catching up to do:

The realities of world economic growth are more complex than I can nuance in this post. There are disparities when we disaggregate the data. Still, the percentage of people living on the equivalent of less than I$1 a day has shrunk from 39% in 1970 to less than 20% in 2000. The UN anticipates it will be less than 10% in 2015. (We will see what impact the recession has.) All this during a period when the world population doubled!

The overall picture is one of unprecedented improvement in the lives of billions of people around the world. Whatever we may think of the rate of change, the overall picture is not one of the poor getting poorer under the oppression of Western consumerism.

Other Measures

• It is frequently noted how violent the Twentieth Century was, yet death through violence as a proportion of the world population was not high for the century. The past thirty years have been some of the most peaceful in recorded history.
• As ranked by Freedom House, the number of people living in free countries rose from 16% to 43% between 1975 and 2005. (See 1975 and 2005)
• Daily caloric intake has shown improvement for the past thirty years. (Chart)
• Child labor rates have been in decline for thirty years. (Chart)
• Literacy has been improving dramatically around the world, even in the poorest nations. (Chart)

Other Considerations

The changes we have seen in the past two centuries are unprecedented, but they can't be totally attributed to economic change. Economic changes have been accompanied by changes in governance, scientific discovery, and improvement in human health ... all of which contribute to, and draw from, each other. But economic productivity has been a major driver of the changes.

The process by which these economic changes came about was often chaotic and destructive. Colonialism and slavery are dark chapters in Western history that preceded and accompanied many changes. But the question is whether these practices were somehow inherent in the emergence of market economies and capitalism. The fact is colonialism and slavery are ancient practices. They have been practiced by societies that knew nothing of capitalism. The great technological and economic power that capitalism created made Western nations especially proficient at these activities, but were they essential?

Economic historian Paul Bairoch highlights two powerful and pervasive myths about colonialism in his book Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes. One is held by the right and the other by the left. The one held by the right is that Western European nations achieved their growth through free trade. He shows convincingly that only after about 1960 did free trade begin to be widely practiced among nations.

The other myth, more pertinent to our discussion, is that colonialism was the backbone of European economic growth. On the contrary, Bairoch shows that imports of raw materials into Western economies accounted for a small fraction of total raw materials, and colonial markets for finished goods never amounted to but a few percentage points of the overall economy. In fact, colonial possessions, established initially when mercantilist thinking was in vogue (16th to 18th Century), may have stunted colonial powers' economic growth during the Industrial Revolution because of the high "carrying cost" of maintaining colonies.

The real damage done to colonies was less a matter of the resources extracted and more about suppressing industrial development within the colonies. The good news is you don't need colonialism to develop a strong economy. The challenge is to nurture industry among the former colonial states, which is happening at various rates worldwide right now.

More directly related to capitalism is what happened to workers as urbanization and industrialization unfolded. That process is happening worldwide, and careful attention needs to be given to these developments by theologians and economists.

I wrote yesterday that one of the standards of shalom was, "Nature itself will be altered into a more peaceful order." While we have seen concern about pollution and the environment move higher on the list of developed nations, and there has been significant improvement, others are emerging into industrial societies where pollution and environmental destruction are increasing. Unforeseen side effects of CO2 have occurred as well. This is tied to the economic decisions we make and needs our reflection as well.

Conclusion

The overall trajectory of life on Earth is one of rising and expanding prosperity. It is not a transformation without challenges. In addition to the above concerns, globalization and its impact on cultures should be considered. Furthermore, we can't simply justify the means by the ends alone. However, we can see that the changes of the last two centuries are unprecedented in the amount of widespread prosperity the world experiences.

If you have about twenty minutes, you may enjoy this presentation by Hans Rosling at TED which graphically illustrates the change.

We turn next to asking how we might think both theologically and economically about these issues.

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Theologians & Economists: The Rise of Unprecedented Prosperity (1)

[Series Index]

Is the state of the world getting better or getting worse? Our mission is to seek the greatest shalom possible in the world, always aware that shalom in its fullness will only be recognized at the consummation of the new creation at Christ's return. But how would we measure shalom?

Isaiah 65:17-25 gives an Old Testament perspective on what the redeemed Israel will look like. Listen to the themes of what constitutes a redeemed world:

17 For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
18 But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
and its people as a delight.
19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem,
and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.
20 No more shall there be in it
an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,
and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
21 They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22 They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
23 They shall not labor in vain,
or bear children for calamity;
for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD --
and their descendants as well.
24 Before they call I will answer,
while they are yet speaking I will hear.
25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent -- its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain, (NRSV)

Several themes jump out from this characterization of a world restored to shalom. There are some very practical and specific features:

• God will delight in his people and be attentive to them. (18-19, 24)
• Safety will prevail. (19)
• Infant mortality will cease. (20)
• Life expectancy will increase beyond 100 years. (20)
• There will be a just and prosperous order in society (absence of war and oppression.) (21-24)
• Nature itself will be altered into a more peaceful order. (25)

The New Testament version of the new creation expands this vision even further. God makes his dwelling with humankind, and there is eternal life. But it seems to me we can look at the features of shalom in this Isaiah passage as standards.

This passage makes direct reference to life expectancy and infant mortality. Demographers and sociologists frequently turn to these measures for a sense of overall societal welfare. Why? These two indicators serve as indirect indicators of other societal realities. Many other social variables (i.e., adequate food, health care, environment, social stability, healthy social institutions, and low crime) must be positive for these two variables to be positive as well.

Life Expectancy

The life expectancy rate is the number of years someone is expected to live at birth. Long life is a universal indicator of prosperity across cultures and time. So what can we say about this measure of prosperity throughout human history? Here are estimates of two scholars:

For most of its existence, Homo sapiens lived in far-flung hunter-and-gathering communities, each of which was quite small and barely able to reproduce itself. Life expectancy at birth was hardly twenty-five years on average, and those persons who survived childhood often died violently, in combat with other hunters, at relatively young ages. (Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, 48)

For much of human history, average life expectancy used to be 20-30 years. By 1900, it had climbed to about 31 years … By 2003 it was 66.8 years. (Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, 31)

To put the last statement by Goklany in perspective, let's graph the estimated life expectancy on a chart:

If we show only the last two centuries, we get a clearer picture:

Using life expectancy as a measure of prosperity, the world is far more prosperous than ever. The gap is narrowing between the top and bottom rungs of the global community. More amazing, most of this change occurred over a time when the total world population grew nearly sevenfold, from less than one billion to almost seven billion today!

This is not to say that every nation, or every region within a nation, or every subgroup within a nation, has prospered equally well. Note the tragic impact of the AIDS epidemic and social chaos in sub-Saharan Africa by looking at this map of life expectancy from Wikipedia:

The trajectory of change is an unprecedented rise in prosperity. It is uneven growth, but every corner of the planet has improved, and the gap between top and bottom nations is closing.

 

Infant Mortality

A second measure of prosperity demographers frequently use is the infant mortality rate. The infant mortality rate is the number of children dying between birth and their first birthday per 1,000 live births. Because the first year of life is when human beings are most vulnerable, their ability to survive the first year of life says a lot about the state of their society; thus, the significance of the infant mortality rate.

So what can we say about this measure of prosperity throughout human history? Here are  two scholarly estimates:

In the year 1000, the average infant could expect to live about 24 years. A third died in the first year of life. Hunger and epidemic disease ravaged the survivors. By 1820, life expectation had risen to 36 years in the west, with only marginal improvement elsewhere. (Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD, 69)

Before industrialization, at least one out of every five children died before reaching his or her first birth day; that is infant mortality measured as the number of children dying before the age of one, typically exceeded 200 per 1,000 live births. … In the United States, as late as 1900, infant mortality was 160; …” (Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, 27)

 

Let's look at the change in the infant mortality rate for the last fifty years:

Note that the average infant mortality rate for developing nations in 2003 is at the same level as that for the developed world fifty years ago. The trend continues downward. This is not to say that every nation, every region within a nation, or every subgroup within a nation, has prospered equally well. As with life expectancy, note the tragic impact of the AIDS epidemic and social has had on sub-Saharan Africa by looking at this infant mortality from Wikipedia:

During the 1990s, there was a slight increase in the rate for the former Soviet nations, but that trend turned positive again. There are disparities between Anglos and non-Anglos in the United States. Disparities exist, but only about a dozen (mostly small) African nations have infant mortality rates above 100. The great majority of the world population lives in nations with far lower rates, including India (34.6) and China (22.1).

Using infant mortality as a measure of prosperity, the world is far more prosperous than ever, and the gap is narrowing between the top and bottom rungs of the global social ladder. There is uneven growth, but every corner of the planet has improved, and the gap between top and bottom nations is closing.

Economic Growth

(Continued ...)

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Theologians and Economists: Knowing the "Common Good"

[Series Index]

Each Sunday, Christians around the world gather and pray, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." It is both a request for an outcome and a statement of commitment to that outcome … to give witness to the coming shalom of the new creation.

The previous post affirmed that selfishness is not of the Kingdom of God. Our self-interest is inextricably connected with God, others, and creation. So surely, our mission must be to pursue the common good of all.

My favorite book on theology and work is Miroslav Volf's Work in the Spirit. Volf writes:

… The good of others must be a goal toward which I am consciously striving. The persuasion that the common good will be realized behind my back, so to speak, as I am busying myself exclusively with myself will not do. … (191)

Individual self-interest can be pursued validly, but it must be accompanied by the pursuit of the good of others. These two pursuits are not in principle mutually exclusive but complementary (though in concrete cases they often conflict.)  …

The horizon of individual concern for the common good is the whole of humanity. … But she [the individual] can keep in mind the good of the world community and attune the pursuit of her own self-interest and the interest of her local community to the good of the world community.

As they work, individuals may not limit their perspective only to local communities, but have to seek the good of all human beings. ... (192)

Brian McLaren writes in Everything Must Change:

First, Jesus addresses the law of progress through rapid economic growth. In its place, he offers the law of good deeds for the common good. … (206, emphasis original)

Pope Benedict XVI in Caritas in Veritate:

Another important consideration is the common good. To love someone is to desire that person's good and to take effective steps to secure it. Besides the good of the individual, there is a good that is linked to living in society: the common good. It is the good of "all of us," made up of individuals, families and intermediate groups who together constitute society[4]. … To desire the common good and strive towards it is a requirement of justice and charity. ... In an increasingly globalized society, the common good and the effort to obtain it cannot fail to assume the dimensions of the whole human family, that is to say, the community of peoples and nations[5], in such a way as to shape the earthly city in unity and peace, rendering it to some degree an anticipation and a prefiguration of the undivided city of God. (Paragraph 7, emphasis original)

Wonderful sentiments, but based on previous posts, do you see the insurmountable challenge? With any given decision, how do you or I or any other entity know what the common good is and which choices advance it? Who, exactly, oversees this striving for the common good, and on what knowledge base are they achieving it?

Proximity to others is essential for assessing how decisions will impact their lives. Society is not a family writ large. I can't assess the impact of my decisions on me and seven billion of my closest friends. There is no oikonomos (household manager) managing the household, nor can there be. To effectively manage societies for the optimal common good would require near omniscience. Remember that every major totalitarian leader and regime of the Twentieth Century claimed they possessed this knowledge and would achieve the common good.

Surely limiting income inequality is for the common good. Yet no one argues that everyone should get the same income. On what basis do we have fair inequality, and how do we know what is optimal for the common good? What if it turns out that allowing a lot of inequality makes everyone better off but means there would be a greater distance between the top and bottom of the scale? Is this better for the common good?

Take something as seemingly straightforward as murder. Surely we agree that murder is not for the common good. Yet there are honor and shame societies where preserving honor demands the execution of a family member who has brought dishonor to the family. This practice is said to maintain greater social stability. Who says this isn't better for the common good?

Economists are sometimes accused of creatively assuming things about a problem for their theories to work. A joke says an economist was asked what a man should do who falls into a deep hole. The economist responds, "Well, first we assume a ladder …." The common good is the theological equivalent of the economist's ladder. The common good exhortation assumes there is a universal standard for what the common good is, that it is readily accessible to each of us, and that there is an apparatus for its implementation, none of which is true!

I think four groups of folks believe something approaching the common good can be discerned and implemented.

Totalitarians – The leader claims to know and pursue the common good, whether based on an ideology or personal charisma.

Free Market Fundamentalists – Markets function with near perfection. The common good is best achieved by letting markets run their course.

Economist Managers –Believe they can so thoroughly model the real world that they can manage the economy for the common good.

Mainline Theologians – Carry a presupposition that someone is or should be in charge of economic outcomes … an oikonomos. Tend to lean heavily on the communitarian wing of modern-day American liberalism for substance on achieving the common good.

"Common good," as it often plays out in many discussions, is a rhetorical device to justify interventionist views over against what is characterized as greed, selfishness, and chaos. Those who oppose an intervention oppose the common good in favor of their selfish behavior or ideological enslavement to markets.

Common good as a theological concept conjures up images of the peaceable kingdom and the coming new creation with God, humanity, and all creation living in perfect harmony … in contrast to a world dominated by sin and death. But when the Bible speaks to issues we might consider of economic importance, it speaks in the context of a culture with little economic specialization and little integration with others beyond the local community. Production options were fixed, meaning economic ethics focused on distribution and interaction with people who lived nearby. Ethics discerned by casting a modern specialized and integrated economy as a small community writ large is useless … even dangerous.

We know that simply pursuing selfish desires, even in our modern context, is not Kingdom building, and we know that none of us can discern the optimal common good with certainty. That is the paradox in which we live.

**********

(For an excellent book demonstrating the challenges of discerning the common good, see Good Intentions: Nine Hot-Button Issues View Through the Eyes of Faith by Charles North and Bob Smietana. For an excellent journal article that addresses the problem of personal versus impersonal systems in making ethical decisions, see Markets and Morality: Things Ethicists Should Consider When Evaluating Market Exchange, by Peter J. Hill and John Lunn.)

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Theologians and Economists: Self-Interest Versus Selfishness

[Series Index]

“Love your neighbor as yourself.” This injunction is mentioned once in the Old Testament (Lev. 19:18), and seven times in the New Testament (Matt. 19:19, 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27; Rom. 13:9; Gal. 5:14; James 2:8) It is the core Christian ethic for relating to others. The antithesis of loving others is selfishness. A central element of market economies is self-interest. Therefore, market economics is antithetical to Christian living.

This is the logic presented by many social justice advocates looking for a new Kingdom economics but is the characterization correct? No. It presumes that “self-interest,” in keeping with colloquial usage, is a synonym for “selfishness.” Few other misconceptions about economics generate more confusion than this one.

In economics, a self-interested action is a purposive behavior. Each action expresses a preference for that act versus others we might have taken. We are neither automatons nor a bundle of random firing neurons. Some calculus tells us which action to take. If I jump in front of a gun fired at a friend, then both the shooter and I have engaged in self-interested behavior. Self-Interest is not selfishness.

So why is there a widely shared perception that market economics is based on selfishness and greed? There are three contributors to the misunderstanding: semantics, economists and pop culture, and errant piety.

Semantics

The words “self-interest” and “selfish” are synonyms in our day, but the connotations of words change over time. In the U. S. Constitution, “liberty” meant not being imprisoned, but it has taken on other layers of meaning sense. The idea of “self-interest” entered economic thought through Adam Smith. He used it synonymously with “self-love.” What did he mean?

Webster’s says self-interest is “Regard for one’s own interest or advantage, especially with disregard for others.” That second clause is the rub. “With disregard for others” was not the connotation Smith gave to the term. Unlike animals that mature into complete independence, human beings depend on exchange. Benevolence was Smith’s highest virtue, but as there is a constant need to coordinate meeting each other’s needs, benevolence alone is insufficient. Smith’s position was that you served your self-interest when you served the self-interest of others. The idea of wanton pursuit of unrestrained desires would have been objectionable to Smith.

Economists & Pop Culture

There have been strands of economic thought that gave voice to rational egoism. With neoclassical economics at the end of the Nineteenth Century came the idea of homo economicus, the utility calculating human at the center of economic analysis. He weighs every decision to optimize personal advantage through rational economic analysis. Probably the biggest boosters of this thinking were economists and activists influenced by novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, with her exhortation of freedom from all restraints in pursuit of self-actualization. Many of these economic thinkers appropriated and distorted Smith’s writings to give credence to their own views, including the distortions of “self-interest” and “invisible hand.” You can find economists who champion selfishness, but they do so on grounds other than economics … just as there are scientists who confuse methodological naturalism for their own metaphysical naturalism and declare that science proves there is no God.

Pop culture and critics of market economies like to lift up Gordon Geko’s (from Wall Street) “Greed is good” as emblematic of market economies … that it is a defining feature economists promote. Clearly, greed is present in market economies, but it has also been present in every other economy throughout history. No system will ever eliminate greed.

My experience has been that most economists view “self-interest” as purposive behavior, as described above. But when economists try to enter into discussion with theologians, I sense there is a very high level of suspicion among theologians that someone is trying to paint lipstick on a capitalist pig … trying to justify “selfishness.” It should not be surprising that there is considerable misunderstanding about “self-interest,” but a serious examination of economics requires going beyond popularized narratives that misrepresent economic views. Theologians know theology can be unjustly trivialized through guilt by association with the worst representatives of the field (e.g., All scientists are God-haters like Richard Dawkins). It is just as unjust with economics.

Errant Piety

Finally, some view “loving others” and “loving self” as antithetical values. It is win-lose … it is a zero-sum game. Others win when I lose. This is not the view of Scripture. John Stackhouse writes:

The amazing paradox of Christian teaching here, however, is that losing one’s life is the way to save it (Mt. 16:24-27). Spending one’s goods on others is the way to pile up treasures of much greater value that will last forever (Mt. 19:21). Altruism is in one’s own interest – including God’s own interest. I need to say this carefully, so I will hew closely to the words of Scripture: Jesus suffered and sacrificed himself on the cross “for the joy set before him (Heb. 12:2), not in a zero-sum game in which he simply had to lose so we would gain. Yes, of course that is partly true also: “by his poverty you have become rich” (II Cor. 8:9). But it was a temporary sacrifice, a temporary poverty. It was an expenditure that was truly costly – may I not be misunderstood as denigrating the grace of God in Christ – but it was spent so as to bring joy to God, as well as to bring salvation to us. It is never one or the other. (Making the Best of  It, 204)

The intended relationship between God, others, and us is multiplicative, not zero-sum. It is a win-win-win multiplicative dynamic in which God wins, others win, and we win. Properly disciplined self-interest enables us to become well-functioning contributive members of the community. We internalize the reality that our interests are inextricably entwined with God’s interests and the interests of others, enabling us to weigh alternatives and choose those that lead to the salvation of our lives (Matt 26:24-27) and to the piling up of eternal treasure (Matt: 19:21), while simultaneously leading to the salvation of other’s lives and the amassing of their treasure, all of which furthers God’s interests and glorifies him. The self-interest calculus for purposive behavior for fallen people is self above all else, but among the redeemed, it is self in proper relationship to God and others… but both uses have a self-interest calculus.

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Theologians & Economists: Division of Labor and Trade Transform the World (2)

[Series Index]

Trade (Continued)

(Yesterday, we quickly highlighted the impact of the division of labor and how trade creates wealth. We continue with the second feature of trade that is too frequently invisible.)

Information and Incentives

The second thing trade does is create an information and incentive system, coordinating economic activity for millions of people.

Take the lowly no. 2 pencil.* Nobody (no one body) knows how to make a pencil. Raw materials must be extracted to create graphite, graphite transformed into graphite rods, trees grown and harvested, lumber processed into wooden cylinders that will hold the graphite, tin extracted from the ground, raw tin processed and rolled into tiny cylinders for eraser holders, raw materials extracted for the eraser, eraser heads processed and shaped, dye created that will go into the paint that will go on the pencil … getting the picture? Different people in various locations are accomplishing all these tasks. But we aren't done.

Consider that sophisticated machinery is involved at every step in this process. Each of those machines contains countless parts made of a myriad of materials. Each raw material had to be extracted, processed into components, and assembled. These machines are also part of making a pencil.

We can go deeper beyond this to the machines that created the machines to create components for the pencil … but we haven't even touched on the transportation infrastructure that allows us to move these components from place to place. There is much more. I'm radically simplifying the process of pencil production!

Buyers are weighing the demand for their product as they determine what they are willing to pay suppliers. Suppliers weigh what buyers offer as they decide how much to supply at each tiny step in this dance of decisions. Price communicates the demand for a product and the willingness of suppliers to supply it. If the price for a product is going up, the suppliers are incentivized to produce more and the buyers to economize. If the price goes down, the suppliers have an incentive to cut production and buyers to buy more. (It isn't quite this simple in all markets, but the general idea holds.)

In all this, no one knows how many pencils are needed. No pencil czar monitors the need for pencils and assures that they are supplied. Most participants in this pencil-making process have no clue that they are contributing to the ultimate creation of the pencil on my desk. Yet through independent responses to dynamic information and incentives, a sufficient number of pencils appear at a reasonable price every day.

Now look closely at some items around you … maybe a stapler, a book, or a roll of adhesive tape. Pay attention to all the materials and processes that have created those items. How about your cell phone? It is humanly impossible to visualize how these things came to be, and we use them daily without a thought. Markets are the information and incentive network that brings all this about.

Market Challengers

This information and incentive system explain why communism and socialism have been so ineffective. No person or entity can possibly know how to match supply and demand at any given moment, much less when the balance changes by the nanosecond. Without a real-time feedback loop, there is no way to coordinate what needs to be done. Excesses of one product appear along with shortages of another, sometimes with tragic consequences.

This should also highlight why calls by theologians like John Milbank for a gift economy … where markets are eliminated, and we give to each other as needed … is misguided. While this might be practical among a face-to-face community, it would end coordinated economic behavior beyond the community. There would be no information to coordinate our projects.

Similarly, there is a movement by some to return to local economies. Revisit the process of making a no. 2 pencil and imagine a person or team collecting all the resources themselves without trade (assuming they are locally available) and processing them into a no. 2 pencil. Think of the hours of labor required to bring it all together into a product that could have been bought for pennies in seconds, along with other items at the store. Now take that image through the production of food, clothing, medicine, hygiene products, housing materials, etc. Living standards would revert to bare subsistence if local economies were genuinely embraced.

Finally, as I noted yesterday, many theologians are blind to production issues. They talk as if the goods we need are just there. The issue is how to distribute them. A corollary to this belief is that wealth is a fixed quantity. Absent any sense of production, wealth is a preexisting fixed amount. That means economics is a zero-sum game. If I have more than the average person, it comes at the expense of those who have less. I recently came across a blog by a caring person who praised the observation, "You cannot abolish poverty unless you also abolish affluence." That is zero-sum thinking in a nutshell.

What could we say about markets from inside the view that sees a fixed amount of wealth and goods? We would say that trade is competition where people try to get more than their fair share. Someone wins at the expense of someone losing. Instead of accepting the abundance God has given us, we covet others' goods out of a false sense of scarcity. As Adam Smith taught, it's all based on selfishness, right?

The essential coordinating function of information and incentives is invisible because the origins of goods and wealth aren't asked. The awareness of people expanding wealth by transforming matter, energy, and data from less useful forms into more useful forms and by participating in mutually beneficial market exchanges that coordinate an incomprehensibly complex economic system is lost. I'm persuaded that this is a near-Copernican-like paradigm shift for many. Economic justice and efficiency do not orbit the distribution of a fixed pile of wealth and goods, but rather distribution orbits the vitality of a just and well-coordinated productivity … without this productivity, there is nothing to distribute.

We turn to the issue of "self-interest" next but let me close by noting what I hope is obvious … what I've said in these two posts is a 50,000-foot view of the historical landscape, pointing out only two significant features that serendipitously emerged over centuries before coming to fruition in the past hundred years. Furthermore, let's keep on the record that markets function far from perfectly and depend on other institutions and values. We will talk about addressing market problems later, but what should not be lost is that when it comes to the need for information and incentives, we have no legitimate alternatives!

(* Some will realize I'm channeling I Pencil.)

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Theologians and Economists: Division of Labor and Trade Transform the World (1)

[Series Index]

Something significant has happened over the last two hundred years, giving rise to an incomprehensibly complex web of international economic activity. What changed? Economic Historians point to two important developments: division of labor and trade.

Division of Labor

Throughout history, households generally produced what they consumed. There were artisans. They produced goods, taking them from raw materials to finished products. The work was piecemeal and usually from home. In the era leading up to the industrial revolution, this began to change in Europe. Some piecemeal workers, especially in Britain, were being gathered into production sites. With greater oversight, quality, and productivity, output increased. But the real innovation came as stages of production were broken down into discreet tasks.

Instead of taking a product from raw materials to finished products, individuals specialized in only one part of the process. Specialization meant two things. The worker became highly proficient at doing one task very well, thus becoming more productive at that task, and less-skilled workers could be trained to do specific tasks eliminating the need for multi-skilled craftsmen … great productivity with less input cost.

The advent of internal combustion engines and the mechanization of factories accelerated this specialization process. Productivity expanded by magnitudes previously unimaginable. Over time, the cost of goods fell faster than wages, improving living standards. Goods became cheaper to buy in relative terms. The road to this happy outcome was horrific for many workers who lived through the changes of the nineteenth century, but that story is for another day.

Division of labor, supplemented by mechanization, radically increased productivity. But productivity is pointless if there is no one to buy your products. Remember that throughout the past, most people lived in isolated communities. With mass production, you would quickly saturate the community with your product. There would be no more customers. Enter trade.

Trade

Trade has two critically important qualities that need to be highlighted. They are not immediately obvious to many: value creation and coordination through information and incentives.

Value Creation

First, trade creates wealth. There is a simple game used in schools that illustrates this reality. A teacher randomly distributes items of roughly equal value to each student in a class. Each student writes down how much they value their item on a scale of one to ten. All the values are combined for a class value. The teacher then divides the class into groups of five. The groups of five are invited to trade. One child gets Barbie clothes in one group, and another gets baseball cards. They decide to swap. They each have something of greater value to them. After trading, the teacher has the students record how much they value their current possession. The group total is calculated again. The new score is higher.

Then the teacher permits the students to trade with anyone in the class. The students rate their possessions once, and the class value is totaled again. The collective value has gone still higher. Wealth has been created through simple exchange ... without anything being produced.

This reality underscores a discovery that took centuries to uncover. No item has intrinsic economic value. Nor is the value of a product equal to the labor employed to create it … as both the early Nineteenth-century classical economists and Marxist economists believed. An item's economic value is determined by what someone is willing to give.

How much is a bottle of water worth, sold to you by someone at your front door? How much is that same bottle of water worth after you have been lost in the desert for 24 hours without water and come across a hermit with a bottle to sell? We buy things based on how much usefulness (utility) we perceive the item will have for us. Multiple people bidding in a market is what sets the price for products.

Moving from the trading game example into national or world economies doesn't work quite as eloquently … the details of why this so goes beyond our scope here. Nevertheless, the general principle is true: trade creates great value through mutually beneficial exchange. The bigger the trade network, the greater the opportunity for everyone to benefit.

Division of labor and trade built on each other. Division of labor and then mechanization led to greater productivity. People were drawn into close proximity (urbanization) to participate in the new production facilities, thereby creating larger communities. There was increased demand for transportation infrastructure that would move raw materials in and finished goods out and demand for better local transportation. Large, concentrated communities facilitated trade, as did infrastructure that connected communities. Greater trade brought greater demand for products motivating producers to become even more productive through specialization and mechanization. And so the cycle was created.

Continued ….

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Theologians and Economists: Scarcity and Abundance

[Series Index]

What am I going to do today? Whether you're a meticulous planner or fly by the seat of your pants, we all face the same reality: Every decision to do something today is a decision not to do everything else. We are constrained by the limited number of hours in any given day. But time isn't the only constraint.

Even if I choose to, I cannot repair an engine block or fly a jet. My abilities are limited. Furthermore, I don't have the tools to fix an engine or access to a jet. My financial and material resources are limited. Constraining all these constraints is my knowledge of tomorrow. What I do today is going to impact what decisions I can make tomorrow.

Then there are the things we need for healthy, satisfying lives. They do not materialize out of thin air. God has created a great abundance, but we participate in our provision. As Henri Nouwen observed, we take bread and wine at communion, not wheat and grapes. Human beings transform matter, energy, and data from less useful forms into more useful forms. We must balance our use of resources with the production of resources if we want a sustainable life. We must engage in productive work that either directly or indirectly (through exchange) provides for us. In short, we have a scarce (i.e., limited) amount of time, capabilities, and resources to prioritize and use daily.

Our decisions do not occur in a vacuum. We live in families and communities. Each of us has our strengths and weaknesses. Living in community allows us to take advantage of each other's strengths and minimize weaknesses. Managing our scarce resources in coordination and cooperation with others is a benefit to all. When we add communities, we have regions, nations, and, ultimately a global community in which the challenges of coordination and cooperation become incomprehensibly complex. But the question remains: Given scarce (i.e., limited) resources, what should we do today, and how will we coordinate billions of projects?

This question was less complex in the past. The masses lived bare subsistence lives as slaves, landed peasants, or subjects of overlords. Life was devoted to agricultural production, except for those recruited or conscripted into various forms of service to the elite. Beyond the elite, non-agricultural trade was mainly limited to exchange between people in local communities. By modern standards, the variety of goods traded was minimal, and the trade networks were rudimentary. "Economic" reflection was primarily devoted to production and consumption issues within the household. Retrospectively, we can see that labor was nearly consumed by simply generating subsistence living.

All that slowly changed in the centuries of the Second Millennium C. E. in Europe, with increasing specialization of labor and expansion of intricate trade networks. The variety of items traded became more elaborate, and the costs became less. Eighteenth-Century people like Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus began to reflect on what was happening. Over the next century, scholars turned to empirical analysis as their work became more focused on these developments. That gave birth to the modern discipline of economics, which at its core is about discovering how people and societies coordinate their activities given the reality of scarce (i.e., limited) resources. So look at almost any textbook on economics, and you will find a definition of economics similar to this one in Greg Mankiw's industry-leading textbook, Principles of Economics: "Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources." (4)

What do leading theologians have to say about this? Douglas Meek's God the Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy, first published in 1989, has been used as a textbook in seminaries and Christian colleges.

Scarcity may not be made the starting point of a system of economic justice. As a starting point, scarcity is an illusion. In almost all situations of human life, scarcity has been caused by human injustice. (174)

In Responsive Labor: A Theology of Work, published in 2006, David H. Jensen writes:

The assumption of scarcity should be unsettling to Christians, for it clashes with a bedrock Christian assumption: God's abundant and superfluous giving to creation, which enables us to share out of abundance. (4-5)

Here is an excerpt from a recent article by Walter Brueggemann at WonderCafe called A Biblical Approach to the Economic Crisis:

Whereas autonomous economics begins with a premise of scarcity, biblical faith is grounded in the generosity of God who wills and provides abundance. And here persons who are members of a covenantal neighborhood respond to divine abundance with generous gratitude, willing to share with sisters and brothers. Those who share, moreover, find in ways they cannot explain that more gifts from God are given. The bread multiplies and loaves abound, a miracle is never available to the autonomous. In that world of abundance, covetous greed is inappropriate and incongruous. So Jesus can urge his followers: "Do not be anxious ... for your heavenly Father knows you need all of these things" (Matthew 6:25-32).

Finally, William T. Cavanaugh writes in Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire:

Economics, we are told, is the science that studies the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. The very basis of the market, trade – giving up something to get something else – assumes scarcity. Resources are scarce wherever the desires of all persons for goods or services cannot be met. In other words, hunger is written into the conditions under which economics operates. There is never enough to go around. But it is not simply the hunger of those who lack sufficient food to keep their bodies in good health. Scarcity is the more general hunger of those who want more, without reference to what they already have. Economics will always be the science of scarcity as long as individuals continue to want. And we are told the human desires are endless. (90)

Do you see the common thread? The only issue these theologians see is distribution. Like manna from heaven, everything we need, from jet aircraft to No. 2 pencils, magically appears. If there is scarcity, it is because someone hasn't shared. The idea that we somehow participate in our own provision is simply lost on them.

Frankly, this focus on distribution to the exclusion of all else is pervasive among theologians. I have a couple of theories on why this is so. First, the question of production is a non-issue in the Bible. Unlike our day, family heritage and necessity dictated what work you did. You had little control over your productivity. However, you had control over how you engaged others in transactions and what to do with your wealth. Thus, "economic" ethics in the Bible is almost exclusively about dealing justly with neighbors and being generous to the poor in face-to-face communities. Since much of church history after the biblical era developed in a similar economic climate, it, too, reflected these narrow agendas. Thus, unless there is an intentional effort to appreciate what has changed in the past couple of centuries, theologians tend to gravitate toward economic theories that at least concord with the ancient vision and disparage views that may counter-intuitively be more just and effective.

Second, unlike Judaism, Christian leaders have a long history of ambivalence, if not animus, toward the marketplace. It persists to this day in many quarters. In many Mainline theological academies, business and economics are what evolution is to conservative institutions ... an idolatrous ethos destroying the world.

Still, one of our most important responsibilities in a multi-disciplinary dialog is to do our best to accurately characterize what representatives of each discipline are saying about key issues. A cursory reading of any Economics 101 text would reveal that what these theologians are saying is a pejorative misrepresentation of what economists mean by scarcity. Read the rest of the paragraph after the sentence I quoted above from Mankiw's textbook:

Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources. In most societies, resources are allocated not by a single central planner but through the combined actions of millions of household firms. Economists therefore study how people make decisions: how much they work, what they buy, how much they save, and how they invest their savings. Economists also study how people interact with one another. For instance, they examine how the multitude of buyers and sellers of a good determine the price at which the good is sold and the quantity that is sold. Finally, economists analyze forces and trends that affect the economy as a whole, including growth in average income, the fraction of the population that cannot find work, and the rate at which prices are rising. (4)

The mischaracterizations above might be forgiven with a college freshman, but these are bright, educated scholars. At the beginning of this series, I pointed out that economists contribute to misunderstandings between the two disciplines. In this case, the theologians have erected a barrier to serious dialog between theology and economics through ad hominem rhetoric. It is pervasive in Mainline theological institutions.

Next, we look at what has given rise to the intricate economic network that coordinates the vast numbers of people and how that has changed the world forever.

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Theologians & Economists: The Oikonomos?

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We begin this post by recounting a story from Starfish and the Spider. The authors relate a story about David Garrison’s (CEO of Netcom … an AOL-type operation) attempt to raise funds from a French venture capital firm in 1995.

… There were about thirty people in the room … It was like they were hearing fantastic tales from this young American about some computer that will change the world. But then we got stumped. One of the investors started asking who was the president of the Internet. We went in circles about how ‘there is no president.’ …

Dave’s explanations were far from satisfactory to the French investors. If they were going to shell out cash for a public offering, they wanted to make sure that someone was in charge, to ensure that this wasn’t a chaotic system. …

Dave recalls that their questions were “based on the concept of ‘It has to be centralized, there has to be a king, or there has to be an emperor, or there has to be a – something.’ These key investors … were a “very intelligent group of people,” but they didn’t get it. Dave tried another approach: the Internet was a network of networks. “We said, ‘There are thirty to forty thousand networks, and they all share in the burden of communication.’ And they said, ‘But who decides?’ And we said, ‘No one decides. It’s a standard that people subscribe to. And they kept coming back, saying, ‘You don’t understand the question, it must be lost in translation, who is the president of the Internet?’ …

Eventually, Dave surrendered. He gave the French what they wanted. “I said I was the president of the Internet, ’cause otherwise we weren’t going to get through the sales spiel. … (32-33)

Substitute “economy” for “internet,” and you have the challenge economists face in discussing the economy.

Previously we saw that the primary metaphor for God’s people is the family of God. Inherent in the family metaphor is the idea of the paterfamilias and the oikonomos; the head of the household and the household manager (or steward.) The paterfamilias had final authority and ownership, but the oikonomos managed the daily affairs. This became the Christian metaphor for our relationship with God and the created order, which includes societal matters. But critical to this notion of household management is that stewards have intimate knowledge of the people and circumstances under their care.

Clearly, ancient cultures had structures that transcended the household. They were pyramid-shaped and vertically oriented. Each family or community answered to some authority with fairly intimate knowledge of those under his charge. Those authorities were under other authorities who knew the authorities under them … and so on, up to a king. People produced most of what they consumed, and what trade happened between people in face-to-face community. Therefore managing the economy was primarily about the daily affairs of people in face-to-face communities and the transfer of wealth upward through the system through taxation for the administration of the King’s projects. There was not an economy to manage in the modern sense.

In contrast to this model, a web of horizontal economic relationships emerged in Europe over the centuries. Awareness of this growing web began to be noticed in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Since then, economic connections have become a more dynamic and complex web of nodes and linkages. Yet there is no oikonomos managing the web. There is no president of the web.

It is deeply ingrained in the minds of many today, like our Frenchmen above, that “somebody must be in charge” … in this case … of the economy. The ability to grasp and internalize the web concept escapes them. U. S. presidents and the electorate certainly play to this misconception, with presidents claiming credit for a good economy and the electorate holding them accountable for a bad one.

I suspect the oikonomos model intensifies the inability of many theologians to see a new reality. For some, it is not only that there conceptually must be someone in charge; it is that there ought to be someone in charge. If there isn’t, then something has gone awry.

To these theologians, a leaderless economic web is anarchy and disorder. Calls for correcting social injustices often imply that “the president of the economic web” (whoever that may be) is not doing their job. We need to compel the “president” to run things better. People who will not generally support centralized management toward particular ends are thought to be morally and intellectually suspect, likely having been duped by individualistic ideologies. (The issue is referee versus manager … one who monitors adherence to rules versus one who is responsible for the performance and outcome of the game. It is to the latter that I’m referring to.)

Further adding to the confusion is the wedding of an oikonomos model to the wing of economics that believes that, through careful scientific work, the principles of economics can be uncovered and objectively applied to achieve certain objectives. The theologians reject the ends to which economists might direct things, but the notion that the economy can and should be directed is retained. The answer is to bring a discerning Christian voice into the mix of economic management. The question of how the information required to make just outcomes happen on a personalized basis for millions of people is known is off the radar. Modernist hubris about being able to remake the world through centralized control by an expertocracy is equated to being God’s oikonomos.

Not all Mainliners think that someone should be in charge. Some view the recent arrival of large impersonal leaderless economic structures as contrary to Christian life. All life must be in face-to-face communities to be Christian. They see the new web of economic connectedness as evil. We should disconnect and become self-sustaining localized economic communities. At least they have come to grips with the reality that something new has emerged.

So, we are called to be the oikonomos … but there is no way we can manage the modern, massively complex, and dynamic web-like economy we live in. The complexities are too great. Is there an alternative way we function as the oikonomos in a web-like economy? We will visit that question shortly, but we first need to visit one more misunderstanding that plagues the theology and economics dialog: scarcity versus abundance.

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Theologians & Economists: "Family Writ Large" and the Information Gap

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Without a doubt, family is the Bible's most pervasive metaphor for the people of God. We are all children of Abraham. We are the household of God, where God is the paterfamilias. We are all brothers and sisters in Christ, with God as the head of the household.

Families are face-to-face communities. People know each other's character and abilities. They are accountable to each other. They know when someone is pulling their weight and when someone is free-riding on the work of others. They sacrifice for each other according to their needs. Greco-Roman households, which could include several families, were unlike modern families in that they largely produced what they consumed and consumed what they produced.

The large impersonal socioeconomic forces we wrestle with to understand and manage today were largely invisible to ancient cultures. These realities were inexorable forces of the gods and nature. If the desire is to improve the human lot in such a context, one is not occupied with how to master what is in the purview of the gods but rather with what can be changed … the behavior that occurs within face-to-face communities. The disciplines of sociology and economics only emerged in the past 100-150 years.

Greek sages like Aristotle offered practical life instruction in what became known as "household codes." Instruction was given to the paterfamilias of the household on issues like financial management and governing the behavior of wives, children, slaves, and others connected with the household. Various passages in the New Testament are presumed to be modeled on these codes, like Ephesians 5:18-6:9, Colossians 3:18-4:1, and 1 Peter 2:11-3:17. Scholars Carolyn Osiek and David Balch even suggest that Jesus may have been riffing on the household code in Matthew 19 and 20. (See earlier post.)

Old Testament teaching is also about face-to-face communities. Broad macro-social structures are not in view. A surface appraisal of some passages … like the Jubilee or gleaning requirements … might seem to suggest otherwise, but this has more to do with projecting our experience back into the text.

The Jubilee redistributed nothing. It prohibited the permanent sale of land and labor by one community member to another. A "sale" of land or labor functioned as a lease agreement. The price was based on the years between the agreement and the next Jubilee. The land and labor reverted to the permanent owner at the Jubilee. These provisions established God as the landholder with the people as tenants, divided by tribe and clan into face-to-face communities. Our modern tools of economic analysis tell us that the Jubilee had an economic impact, but it is anachronistic to see the Jubilee as an economic justice initiative. The Jubilee regulated land and labor transactions of people in face-to-face community.

Gleaning was also mandated, but who did the gleaning? The poor in the community known to the farmer. Gleaning was a provision that made it ethically incumbent to care for the poor who were a part of one's face-to-face community.

It is also instructive to note the outcry of the prophets. Despite claims to the contrary, there is no condemnation of inequality in wealth distribution … as though someone had done an analysis of income quintiles and found something amiss. What we find are repeated invectives against corruption at the city gates (the courts), the use of bribes, and the use of dishonest weights and measures. We find condemnations of the rich who acquired wealth dishonestly. These are about unethical behavior in face-to-face communities. To the degree that "social justice" is discussed in the Bible throughout pre-nineteenth Century history, it is about people's ethics in face-to-face communities.

So what has changed? Through specialization of labor and the emergence of markets in Europe, people's lives became ever more interdependent. With the explosion of the industrial revolution in the late Eighteenth Century, individual economic behavior became inextricably linked with millions of people. We were now economically connected through large impersonal communities with people we will never know (and as we will see, these changes have led to more than a doubling of life expectancy and a stunning improvement in the quality of life for much of the world's population.) And therein is the problem.

All our ethical reflections up until very recently presumed the management of behavior in the context of face-to-face communities. As noted, these communities have built-in knowledge among the members about each other's character, abilities, needs, and shortcomings. There is accountability.

But face-to-face communities can only grow so large. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar says that the maximum size of an individual's social network to grow and maintain stable interpersonal relationships is about 150 people. Groups that have attempted communal living find that beyond this size, mutual monitoring of each other's behavior disappears, innovators break with the community creed, free-riders begin to take advantage of the community, and overly productive workers become disillusioned.

The Hutterites, a communal group that has endured over generations, require a community split into two communities when they reach 120 members. Congregational growth studies tell us that one of the most difficult transitions is when a congregation grows into the 150-200 range. It moves from being a family church to a programmatic church. It is simply impossible for a large group with hundreds of people, much less thousands or millions, to function as a family or face-to-face community.

No person or human entity has the omniscience to sort out issues on a case-by-case basis, weighing each individual's particulars, and then make just decisions. The interpersonal knowledge necessary to manage the affairs of millions of people is simply absent. Yet when it comes to economics, the dominant way theologians wrestle with economic questions is to impose face-to-face ethics on large impersonal economic structures, merely presuming that someone knows how to adjudicate wisely. Other theologians discern the difference in face-to-face structures but reject the presence of impersonal socioeconomic structures as anti-Christian because they can't function according to face-to-face ethics.

This failure to come to grips with the implications of impersonal communities of cooperative behavior is one of the single biggest obstacles theologians have in understanding economics.

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Theologians & Economists: The Mainline Theological View of Economics

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George Bernard Shaw said, "If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion." It is true that economists are hardly a monolithic bunch. Yet, it would be untrue to say that there are no core economic principles upon which economists agree … things like the relationship of supply and demand, price (microeconomic) theory of value, or the centrality of markets. The disagreement usually comes at the point of how well things like the market function and what interventions should be made. But today, I don't want to explore what economists think about economics. I want to see if I can capture what Mainline theologians and pastors typically think economics is about. I think it would go something like this …

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God is the creator and Lord over all that is. God created humanity to be caretakers of creation. In a real sense, the Earth is God's household, and we are the household managers. Furthermore, God has created an abundance that we are all to share in shalom-filled relationships as we seek the community's common good.

Economics is dominated by anti-Christian capitalist values born out of Modernism's quest for self-autonomy. Instead of abundance, economists postulate scarcity and then glorify selfishness and greed in competition over scarcity. They postulate an "invisible hand" powered by selfishness as a replacement for the providence of God and Christian ethical behavior. Capitalism is dependent on endless consumerism, which is destroying the planet. (Of course, conservative Christians see no problem with this since the earth will eventually be destroyed.) It depersonalizes people, turning them into commodities for exploitation by economic players. It violates biblical values of equality, making the rich richer and the poor poorer, all the time justifying paying people less than a living wage.

Therefore, while capitalism may have accomplished some great things, it can hardly be considered just and is worthy of our commendation. Economists who so ardently defend capitalist market economies have made an idol of their ideology … let's call it theocapitalism. Christian mission requires we put God and God's Kingdom first, redirecting markets toward the common good … that we rediscover our connectedness to others and function as the human family God has called us to be.

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Well, how was that? I'm not suggesting that Mainline theological academies are monolithic, but I think I've captured the basic gist of what you might expect.

Next, I will turn to a few pivotal points that I believe are deeply and pervasively misunderstood by theologians about economics. You still may not agree with the economist's perspective, but we must grasp what they say if there is to be honest dialog.

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Theologians and Economists: Hubris Economicus

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To kick off this discussion about why Theologians and Economists don't get along, I want to look briefly at the contribution of Economists to the tension.

Throughout human history, social life was conceived in terms of face-to-face relationships. What we know study as macro forces in sociology and economics were seen as the inexorable forces of the gods or nature. From at least the time of the Enlightenment, an awareness of impersonal relationships between large groups of people (like cities and nations) that shape our lives began.

Adam Smith (1723-1790), falsely identified as the father of capitalism, began to observe the interrelationship of these large impersonal forces that generate wealth. He wrote about them regarding political economy … "management of the societal household," if you will. In studying his parish records and other sources, Rev. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) detected a pattern where agricultural abundance tended to spawn population growth that outstripped the ability of agriculture to feed everyone. Short of famine, war, or plague, the system would eventually bring about a collapse in the population, and the process would begin all over.

Probably the most influential person in establishing American economic education was Francis Wayland (1796-1865), a clergyman educator whose political economy text was premier during the mid-nineteenth century. While these men, and others like them, were gaining insight into the relationship between impersonal socioeconomic forces, they were still largely possessed by the idea of the immutability of these forces. God's providence governed the order of things, and interference with them would be counterproductive.

In the late nineteenth century, we first saw a field called "economics" emerge. Often called "neoclassical economics," economists systematized many concepts taught in modern textbooks today. More importantly, the move was made to apply the rigors of science to the subject matter. The vision was of objective economic science, disassociated from ethics and values, with economists functioning as the arbiter of public policy questions. The desire was to move away from normative economics that incorporated notions of what the economy should be to "value-free" positive economics.

Part and parcel of the neoclassical school became the concept of "homo economicus," the economic man, a thoroughly rational utility calculating machine (who critics would say had incredible knowledge about markets that no actual human being could ever have.) Economic analysis was done with homo economicus as the presumed actor.

Yet careful analysis and cross-cultural studies indicating that people in different cultures value things differently cast considerable doubt on this formulation and method. The transcendent meaning people see in their actions frequently leads people to behave in ways inconsistent with the narrow utility calculation of homo economicus. Multiple attempts have been made to rescue and resurrect our friend, but I'm not sure any can succeed.

This exemplifies one of the frequently leveled criticisms against many economic models: They are often constructed to ignore major difficulties and include only those elements that support the desired outcome. Thus, the joke about asking an economist, "A man falls into a deep hole and cannot climb out. What should he do?" The economist's response? "Well, first, we assume a ladder …." The models work with great precision, but to what degree do models approximate reality?

This is not to say that economic analysis is useless. That is an overreaction. Economic analysis is of immense value. But postmodern critiques remind us that no one stands in a value-free objective place outside reality and does research. Beliefs about what constitutes things like rationality, utility, and justice are inescapable in economics. There are no objective observers.

Today we can see values working their way out in the public debate. Virtually all economists today agree about the centrality of markets. However, some believe markets will deliver the optimal outcome in almost any circumstance. Failure of markets to deliver is not a result of market failure but rather of markets distorted by intervention. Consequently, the best thing we can do is to grease the wheels of the markets and get out of the way.

Others also believe vibrant markets are essential, but markets have considerable imperfections. They say significant government intervention is required to achieve optimal outcomes. Can either view be established beyond a doubt, even with more rigorous empirical research? I'm guessing not unless you already share a predilection for one of the views.

So, what does all this mean for the relationship between theologians and economists?

First, real or imagined, there is perceived hubris on the part of economists. The idea of being the impartial arbiter of economic truth from outside the public debate leaves economists looking aloof … lacking in compassion and knowledge of their ideas' real-world consequences. Couple this with some economists' penchant for mocking Christian values, and the animosity is understandable. The phenomenon feels very familiar to the polemic stance of evolutionist Richard Dawkins toward Christianity.

Second, introductory college education in economics has been woefully lacking. It has been more oriented toward articulating economic tools and concepts that will lay the groundwork for more economics courses rather than equipping non-specialists to see and reflect on their world through an economic lens.

Third, Christian economists have been scarce in the dialog about theology and economics (though I think this is improving.) I think I can count the number of recent books on one hand that are written by economists that systematically help non-specialists process economics and theology. (Victor Claar and Robin Klay's Economics in Christian Perspective and John Stapleford's Bulls, Bears and Golden Calves are two I can think of.)

I can appreciate the challenges. I suspect many Christian economists feel caught in a double bind between economist colleagues who frown on entering the public debate and Christians predisposed to be hostile to economics. But the net consequence is that partisan ideological groups heavily dominate the debate, and their take is perceived as representative of mainstream economic thinking.

As we will see shortly, I believe there are enormous misunderstandings about economics on the part of theologians. However, I don't think all the blame for theologians "not getting it" can be placed at the feet of theologians. There has been hubris by economists that gets in the way and a detachment that creates barriers to people developing an economic lens.

What other factors would you identify contributing to the animosity and distrust?

For your amusement, you might get a kick out of the T-Mobile ad about economists trying to educate the public: Click here.

Also, check out this interpretation of basic economic principles by a stand-up comedian and economist:

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Why Don't Theologians & Economists Get Along?: Evolution, Economics, & Theologians

[Series Index]

Why don't theologians (particularly Mainline*) and economists get along? This has intrigued me for years. I'm still not sure I have the answer, but recently I've had some insights I want to process out loud with you through this blog.

I believe economists are partly responsible for the problem. Attitudes stemming from the discipline's origins in Nineteenth-Century positivism are an issue. Theologians are also responsible. Christian ethics of the past have been constrained to micro-level transactions of individuals and families in their daily routines. Over the last couple of centuries, the discovery of how large human systems operate and the challenges this presents to Christian ethics has not been appreciated.

If you've ever been to a therapist, you know one of the questions they ask frequently is, "Does this feel familiar?" Reflecting on the divide between theologians and economists, I recently discovered that this indeed feels familiar.

My father was a scientist. I was around scientists all through my childhood. I have several friends who are in various scientific fields. Yet I've also been in reasonably theologically conservative (by Mainline standards) environments most of my life. The question of evolution often emerges. I am a theistic evolutionist. I'm more persuaded than ever by the position. As you can imagine, that tends to generate some "interesting" discussions. My conversation and interaction with Mainline theologians (and I include in this the pastors and scholars they produce) on economics are eerily like talking to conservatives about evolution.

Let me demonstrate some key themes. I suspect you know what I mean by evolution. By economics, I'm referring to the widely held affirmation by most economists of the importance of supply and demand, price theory of value, free markets, and capitalism as the optimal economic system (though there is considerable variance on the implications of these issues that goes unnoticed by critics; more on that later.) I realize the following greatly oversimplifies, but I think it will help highlight the patterns I see.

Anti-Christian

Conservative Theology and Evolution – "Evolution undermines the plain teaching of Scripture that God created the world in seven literal days. It thereby undermines the authority of all Scripture. It substitutes forces of blind chance for God's providence. It is deeply grounded in Modernists aims of autonomy from God." Evolutionists are Godless atheists.

Mainline Theology and Economics – "Economics undermines the core ethical teaching of Scripture about God's love and justice. It strikes at the heart of the Kingdom of God. It substitutes unbridled markets (greed and selfishness) and an "invisible hand" for God's love and justice. It is deeply grounded in Modernist aims of autonomy from God." Economists are theocapitalists.

It's Just Ideology

Conservative Theologians and Evolution – "Evolutionism is a hopelessly anti-Christian ideology (materialism). There is no need to become seriously acquainted with the knowledge that underlies the positions."

Mainline Theologians and Economics – "Economics is a hopelessly anti-Christian ideology (Social Darwinism). There is no need to become seriously acquainted with the knowledge that underlies the positions."

Spotlight the Fringe

Conservative Theologians and Evolution – Frequently lifts the most obnoxious or controversial evolutionists who have portrayed their metaphysical materialism as science, making them the poster child for the position. (ex. Richard Dawkins)

Mainline Theologians and Economics – Frequently lifts the most obnoxious or controversial economic thinker who has portrayed greed and selfishness as the basis of market capitalism and makes them the poster child for the position. (ex. Ayn Rand)

Identity Marker

Conservative Theologians and Evolution –Belief in evolution symbolizes the liberal church's departure from the historic faith. Being anti-evolution is an identity marker distinguishing oneself from liberalism.

Mainline Theologians and Economics – Belief in market economics is viewed as symbolic of the conservative church's departure from the mission of God's Kingdom. Being anti-market economics is an identity marker distinguishing oneself from conservatives.

What is interesting is that conservative theological types do not generally seem to have serious qualms about mainstream economics. I suspect this may be due to the focus of economics on large social structures while much of conservative Christianity is absorbed with the individual Christian life. Economics doesn't seem to directly threaten the authority of Scripture or the challenge of "winning souls for Christ." On the other hand, evolution directly threatens what they see as the mission of God.

Conversely, Mainline theological types do not seem to have serious qualms about evolution. It poses no particular challenge to their nonscientific and ahistorical reading of key Scripture passages. It has nothing directly to say to the establishment of God's Kingdom of love and justice. On the other hand, economics directly threatens what they see as the mission of God.

So as I move into this series, my central focus is on theologians and pastors who hail from the Mainline theological milieu, though I know this applies to hosts within various Evangelical environments. I believe that just as theological patterns of the past and misconceptions about science have hampered conservative theologians from coming to grips with science over the past couple of centuries, so have theological patterns of the past and misconceptions about economics severely hampered Mainline theologians in coming to grips with economics over the same time frame.

Can I capture the essence of what divides theologians and economists? I don't know. But maybe with a bit of help from my blog reader friends, we can learn more.

(* By "Mainline," I'm referring to the longstanding denominations that mostly reached their heyday in the 1950s and have identified with the National Council of Churches community, like United Methodist, ELCA, PCUSA, Episcopal, American Baptist, UCC, Christian Church. Social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church will also be included in my discussion.)

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