Implicit and Explicit Theology: Beyond Ethics
In this book, we have challenged the idea that free-market economics is a neutral science that can be developed in a vacuum, as it were. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, there is no neutral position from which to start. Those who claim neutrality, whether in economic theory or in theology, forget this simple truth. Our social locations, our values, and our beliefs cannot be turned off at will, and neither can we ever completely escape the powers that be. If those things are not accounted for and addressed, they will come in through the back door and haunt us. This was Antonio Gramsci’s point about what he called the “traditional intellectuals”: they may consider themselves neutral and independent, but they always end up supporting the status quo because this is the context that shapes us by default.1
While it is increasingly recognized that values matter in economic discourse, in this book we have dug deeper: our values have complex roots, as they are shaped by our hopes and desires, which are tied to a sense of ultimate reality. It is here that theology can be of help. Understood as self-critical reflection on images of ultimate reality or God,2 theology helps us to address two significant questions: Where do images of God come from, and where do they lead us?3 In addition, theology might help us identify alternatives that are often repressed. In this context, arguments about values often tend to short-circuit the debate. The notion of self-interest is a case in point: while economists in the tradition of Adam Smith have regarded self-interest as a positive factor which drives the economy and contributes to common interest and progress,4 in common ethical opinion and in most ethical debates self-interest is usually portrayed as a negative value that can only lead to selfishness. Robert Nelson notes that such general ethical prejudices are among the biggest hurdles for students of economics. The first task of economics, which strongly depends on the concept of self-interest, is, therefore, to overcome such common ethical short circuits. Free-market economists do this, for instance, by trying to demonstrate that free markets work successfully and are, thus, able to channel self-interest in support of common interest and the common good.5 In this context, the question is not whether economics has values or not—even self-interest can be seen as a positive value—but which values are affirmed based on the bigger picture. Here we enter the realm of theology.
The work of Nelson supports my argument when he points beyond the ethical to the religious dimensions of economics. The free-market economy, in his opinion, is based not only on ethics but also on a religion, which is able to provide the larger framework for the pursuit of self-interest.6 Nevertheless, Nelson does not raise the question of God. Going beyond Nelson, we need to ask what images of God and ultimate reality are presupposed in such a religion. What are the foundations of our hope, and where are our desires rooted? The tools of theological reflection will help us in this search, allowing us to dig deeper, and to investigate how solid those foundations are. As we have seen in the previous chapter, theological reasoning can contribute to fresh perspectives on issues such as self-interest, pushing beyond the common ethical demonizations as well as the unilateral economic endorsements of the concept. Theology will only be of help, however, if we keep in mind its contextual nature. Even seemingly abstract and general dogmatic theological statements and confessions of faith are rooted in particular contexts. When 1 John 4:16 claims that God is love, for instance, the reference is not to love in general but to a particular history of love that is closely connected to how the authors of the passage experienced God’s love in their own world. When the context of theological statements is neglected, we end up with absolute images of God that can no longer be debated and corrected, and that are, therefore, easily misused. Church history is full of examples of such misuse of absolute images of God—usually in the interest of the powers that be.7 The most severe trouble emerges when such images of God operate implicitly and below the surface, without being recognized.
Once both our implicit and explicit images of God are uncovered and brought out into the open—the work that is done in the previous chapters of this book—theology can engage them, debate them, and propose alternatives. German theologian Ulrich Duchrow and a team of German-speaking theologians have sought to addresses these theological underpinnings in a context that is usually confined to a debate of ethics and values. Duchrow observes that in addressing ethical issues like, for instance, the moral responsibility of CEOs and other business leaders, bigger problems are often hidden, and the system itself is endorsed or at least goes unchallenged.8 Rather than limiting the discussion to the ethical performance of representatives of the system, we need to take a deeper look at the system and the theology that grounds it. Duchrow’s comments are made in the context of a position paper by the Evangelische Kirche in Germany (EKD), which emphasizes the ethical responsibility of CEOs while explicitly endorsing the system of corporate profits and economic competition.9 To be sure, the ethical critique leveled here is stronger than most public pronouncements by prominent Christian leaders in the United States in the new millennium: Wolfgang Huber, the presiding bishop of the Evangelische Kirche, made national headlines with his ethical critique of CEOs. In a case that drew much media attention in Germany, he challenged the chairman of the Deutsche Bank, Josef Ackermann, for focusing too much on profits and not enough on his responsibility for the common good in times of financial crisis. Huber, moving beyond the realm of ethics into the realm of theology, went on to compare this attitude to worshiping a golden calf.10
While Huber makes reference to idolatry in the context of a particular overemphasis on profits, he does not question the system that produces profits. Duchrow, on the other hand, identifies a full-fledged theological problem with the system itself that has reached the status of a confessional issue for the church.11 Reminiscent of the struggles of the European Reformation in the sixteenth century, economics is identified in this latter position as a confessional issue that cuts to the heart of what the church believes. As a result, theologians and the churches are challenged to take a confessional stance that challenges the implicit theology of the free market, which is becoming more and more explicit. Unlike many theological arguments that remain confined to the realm of the academy, this argument has been picked up by large international church bodies—in particular, by the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC), which have developed theological statements that address the theology of the market.
The Tenth Assembly of the LWF in 2003 formulated the challenge in this way:
Through our diverse experiences, we are facing the same negative consequences of neoliberal economic policies (i.e., the Washington Consensus) that are leading to increased hardship, suffering and injustice in our communities. As a communion, we must engage the false ideology of neoliberal economic globalization by confronting, converting and changing this reality and its effects. This false ideology is grounded in the assumption that the market, built on private property, unrestrained competition and the centrality of contracts, is the absolute law governing human life, society and the natural environment. This is idolatry and leads to the systematic exclusion of those who own no property, the destruction of cultural diversity, the dismantling of fragile democracies and the destruction of the earth.12
The theological problem is clearly stated here: it is the full-fledged idolatry of the free market as false god, which is characteristic of the system as a whole and goes beyond individual ethical missteps. This problem is compounded by its results that, as the document states, can be observed particularly in the global South and in Central Eastern Europe. The assembly further notes the results of what it denounces as the results of the idolatrous worship of false gods: a growing gap between the rich and the poor that especially affects women, youth, and children; the marginalization of Indigenous people; the growing international debt; unemployment and underemployment; and free trade of capital and goods without free movement for people.13 This analysis leads to a renewed commitment by the church to assume its prophetic role by promoting justice and human rights; raising awareness of these problems; and taking concrete action through ecumenical partnerships between the churches, multifaith cooperation, and participation in social alliances like the World Social Forum.14
The WARC in 2004 took an even clearer theological position, after providing the following analysis of the problem:
In classical liberal economics, the state exists to protect private property and contracts in the competitive market. Through the struggles of the labour movement, states began to regulate markets and provide for the welfare of people. Since the 1980s, through the transnationalization of capital, neoliberalism has set out to dismantle the welfare functions of the state. Under neoliberalism the purpose of the economy is to increase profits and return for the owners of production and financial capital, while excluding the majority of the people and treating nature as a commodity. As markets have become global, so have the political and legal institutions which protect them. The government of the United States of America and its allies, together with international finance and trade institutions (International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization) use political, economic, or military alliances to protect and advance the interest of capital owners.
This analysis, which makes explicit reference to the working class and the ownership class, leads to the following theological statement: “Speaking from our Reformed tradition and having read the signs of the times, the General Council of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches affirms that global economic justice is essential to the integrity of our faith in God and our discipleship as Christians. We believe that the integrity of our faith is at stake if we remain silent or refuse to act in the face of the current system of neoliberal economic globalization and therefore we confess before God and one another.” Thus, what is at stake is not just an economic matter but the heart of the Christian faith itself.
From this crucial insight, the WARC pronounces a series of confessions and rejections that are modeled after the Barmen Declaration in which the German Confessing Church pronounced its resistance to Nazi Germany in 1934. Here are some examples: confessing God as Creator and Sustainer of life and Jesus’ mission to bring the fullness of life (reference to John 10:10 and Ps 24:1), the WARC rejects “the current world economic order imposed by global neoliberal capitalism and any other economic system, including absolute planned economies, which defy God’s covenant by excluding the poor, the vulnerable and the whole of creation from the fullness of life,” as well as “any claim of economic, political, and military empire which subverts God’s sovereignty over life and acts contrary to God’s just rule.” Confessing God’s covenant with all of creation as gift of grace, which includes the poor and marginalized as “preferential partners” (reference to Gen 9:8–12; Isa 55:1; Matt 25:40; and Hos 2:18; and the following), the WARC rejects “the culture of rampant consumerism and the competitive greed and selfishness of the neoliberal global market system, or any other system, which claims there is no alternative.” Confessing that human beings are called to choose God over Mammon, the WARC rejects “the unregulated accumulation of wealth and limitless growth that has already cost the lives of millions and destroyed much of God’s creation.” Confessing that God is a God of justice and the God of the destitute, the poor, the exploited, the wronged, and the abused (reference to Ps 146:7–9), the WARC rejects “any ideology or economic regime that puts profits before people, does not care for all creation, and privatizes those gifts of God meant for all,” as well as “any teaching which justifies those who support, or fail to resist, such an ideology in the name of the gospel.” Based on the confession that God requires us to do justice, love kindness, and walk in God’s ways (reference to Mic 6:8 and Amos 5:24); the WARC rejects “any theology that claims that God is only with the rich and that poverty is the fault of the poor. We reject any form of injustice which destroys right relations—gender, race, class, disability, or caste,” and “any theology which affirms that human interests dominate nature.”15
I am referencing these two documents so extensively because, in the United States, it is not very well known that churches have taken explicit theological stands on these matters. There are other examples as well, including some statements by the United States Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops and by the United Methodist Church. In their Pastoral Letter “Economic Justice for All,” the Roman Catholic bishops state, for instance, that “our faith calls us to measure this economy, not by what it produces but also by how it touches human life and whether it protects or undermines the dignity of the human person.” On this basis, the bishops suggest “that the time has come for a ‘New American Experiment’—to implement economic rights, to broaden the sharing of economic power, and to make economic decisions more accountable to the common good.”16 The United Methodist Church states in its Social Principles that “all economic systems” are “under the judgment of God no less than other facets of the created order,” and claims support for “measures that would reduce the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.”17 All these statements provide important starting points as they raise the implicit theology of the market to the level of consciousness, begin to engage it, and suggest alternatives. More work needs to be done, however, as the systematic nature of the theology of the market needs to be explored further and analyzed more succinctly. This chapter will provide additional suggestions for how theology matters in economic discourse.
Religion and Economics, Upside Down
The problem with religion and economics is not that there are overlaps and that economics shapes religion—just as religion impacts economics. The problem is that mainline religion and mainline economics cover up these connections, and, by doing so, they endorse the status quo. This sense has grown stronger throughout the chapters of this book and is confirmed by a comment of Robert Nelson on the importance of Adam Smith: “The greatest significance of Adam Smith to the economic history of the world was not in any power of economic explanation but in offering a ‘scientific’ doctrine by which the many losers from all this radical change could be persuaded to accept their faith without active revolt.”18 From the Christian perspective, we are dealing here with a theological distortion that puts at risk the Christian faith itself, which cannot be reconciled with any logic that keeps down the “losers” and the lost.
There is something odd about Christianity when it seeks to move from the top down, although this has become a common mode of operation over the centuries. From the German perspective, sociologist Dirk Baecker has pointed out that free-market capitalism now functions like the spirits and gods of old: one has no choice but to submit to its tempers and decisions—ambivalence is eschewed, and no critique is permitted. Baecker doubts that the critique of religion will help much, as capitalism, itself, has turned into religion, equating money and the divine.19 Another German scholar, Christoph Deutschmann, argues that, in such a situation, replacing one myth with another may not help anymore: “disenchantment” and “weaning” should be the next steps.20 Religion, itself, needs critique and demystification.
Yet there are alternatives to capitalism, which are often overlooked, some of them as old as capitalism itself. Only twelve years before the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote in his journal: “Religion must not go from the greatest to the least, or the power would appear to be of men.”21 This statement anticipates much of the nineteenth-century critique of religion, which argued that religion was, for the most part, a projection of people’s ideals.22 Yet Wesley’s statement also contains what is missing in the nineteenth-century critique of religion: namely, a sense that this critique may not apply to religion in general. Rather, we are dealing here with the critique of the religion of the powerful who are accustomed to shaping everything in their image: their workers, their colonies, the political system, the world of the intellect, and also religion. Religious projection is primarily (although not exclusively) the problem of the powerful, and so it is not surprising that these processes are still at work when we imagine God in terms of all those who operate from the top down: the superrich, the superpowers, and so on. Such images of God may indeed be not much more than the projections of wealth and power.
From this perspective, we can observe an odd aspect of Smith’s account that is missed by all those who praise Smith’s “realism,” economists and theologians alike: due to his belief in the balancing effects of the market, he does not perceive the dangers of a position of top-down power. These dangers can only be seen from the perspective of those who do not benefit from the market—the kinds of people with whom John Wesley was in ministry, like the members of the newly emerging working class, as well as those who were even worse off due to dismal poverty, crippling sickness, imprisonment, or slavery. If the religion that goes “from the greatest to the least” is easily unmasked as a human construct—the construct of the powerful, to be precise—the religion that goes the other way around may have more promise. This type of religion from the bottom up cannot be explained quite so easily. No one will be surprised if those who are in control of great fortunes and who command positions of power are successful at imposing their own interests on whatever they choose—religion and images of the divine included. This is the default mode of how things work, for even those who occupy less powerful positions usually turn to those who are in positions of power in order to make things happen. Mainline churches, for the most part, tend to function in this way: they build their budgets on the contributions of the biggest donors and model their programs accordingly.23 The construction of anything from the underside, however, follows a different process.
In the previous chapter, we mentioned that Moses organized a band of slaves and that Jesus was a construction worker. Many other traditions in the Bible follow this bottom-up logic: when Israel demands a king after a long history of alternative forms of rule, God pronounces a severe warning that kings will take people’s sons for their armies and their daughters as servants, demand the best of their fields, and ultimately enslave everyone (1 Sam 8:10–18). When God finally gives in to the will of the people and appoints a king, things take a turn for the worse—and, when God appoints the next king, God chooses not the tallest and strongest but the youngest son of a family, who did not even count in his own father’s eyes (1 Sam 16:1–13). When Christianity was tempted to adapt to the Roman Empire, the Apostle Paul noted that “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (1 Cor 1:27–28). In these passages and many more like them, a deep logic of the Judeo-Christian traditions is anchored. The ancient confession that Jesus Christ is both fully divine and fully human, which unites most Christian denominations, adds another wrinkle to this logic that is hardly considered by most contemporary Christians. In Jesus Christ, Godself not only takes the side of construction workers, but becomes a construction worker; this is the reality to which the often mystified term kenosis (God’s self-emptying in the incarnation) refers. When Christians affirm that “the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14), we must no longer overlook the fact that Christ became flesh in a particular body, in a particular place and time, and in a particular social location—as the son of a construction worker and an unwed mother at the margins of the Jewish world, which, itself, was merely at the margins of the Roman Empire.
Christianity has too often repressed these facts, and the commonly recited creeds, the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, make no reference at all to the life and ministry of Christ. Fortunately, this tendency of spiritualizing and generalizing Jesus has never gone uncontested, and it can be argued that the Gospels of the New Testament were written in order to combat it. Mainline Christian theology has had a hard time admitting to the particularity of the person of Jesus throughout its two-thousand-year history; even at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, when the fullness of Jesus’ humanity was asserted together with his divinity, this issue was skirted, as both Jesus’ humanity and his divinity were asserted in general terms, without reference to the kind of person that Jesus was. The result of this oversight was not the affirmation of generic humanity, as is often believed; the result was the affirmation of dominant humanity at the time and of dominant humanity ever since. Since there is no generic humanity (just like there can be no theological vacuum), if nothing is specified and no particulars are mentioned, the top-down position becomes the default position.
For Christianity, it is the incarnation of God in the construction worker Jesus Christ, born in a stable rather than a palace, in the company of service workers who tended other people’s sheep (Luke 2:1–20), which turns things upside down. The typical religiosity that goes from the greatest to the least comes to a halt here and is turned around. This has implications for our images of God and, ultimately for Godself. If this Jesus was really God—“of the same substance” with God, as the Nicene Creed states—there must be something to God’s substance that is overlooked in mainline religion. Even the pre-Christian story of Moses becomes clearer when seen in this light, as it now makes more sense why God would speak the following sentences: “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians” (Exod 3:7–8). The theological grounding of what we have called the logic of downturn is now established even more firmly. As the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ turns things upside down, we might say that the incarnation is the logic of downturn. This position has deep roots in the Christian traditions.
In recent theological history, Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggested that we need to “follow God where God has already preceded us,”24 and even the mature Karl Barth of the Church Dogmatics stated clearly that God takes the side of those who are oppressed: “God always takes His stand unconditionally and passionately on this side and on this side alone: against the lofty and on behalf of the lowly, against those who already enjoy right and privilege and on behalf of those who are denied it and deprived of it.”25 More recently, liberation theologians have developed similar insights further in ways that have still not yet been fully digested by contemporary theology.26 All these voices remind us, in their own ways, that the problem with failing to look on the underside where God is at work in the world is not merely that we are losing an important aspect of the image of God; the problem is that we might miss the reality of God altogether. This insight cannot be overemphasized.
The story of what has been called “urban ministry” offers an example of what is at stake here. Current efforts by churches to engage in ministry in urban areas are commonly built on the presupposition that we need to bring God back into these places: it is implicitly assumed that God left the cities when middle-class churches moved to the suburbs as a result of white flight and growing affluence. According to this logic, God moves with those whose fortunes and wealth are increasing, and the increase in fortune and wealth is seen as proof of the presence of God, just like the decrease of fortune and wealth in urban areas is seen as proof of the absence of God. In this situation, the task of the church is seen as bringing God back into these places of struggle. Based on what we have found so far, however, there is another option that is hardly considered: What if God did not leave the city when the churches left? Such a thought would not only imply a different approach to the praxis of urban ministry, it would also imply a different theology, which would take the notion of God’s incarnation at the underside of history seriously.
From this perspective, not all of religion is necessarily a projection. If Christianity moves the other way around—according to its own inherent logic, not “from the greatest to the least,” but from the least to the greatest—new perspectives open up where projection is not the major concern due to a lack of power and incentives to project. This is true not just for theology and religion but also for economics. If economics is too often the projection of those who benefit from it—with all the resulting problems of the creation of bubbles based on wishful thinking such as we have seen in recent history—things change when economics is seen from the bottom up. The persons who end up homeless and on the street, for instance, may have some important insights, of which the CEOs are not aware, about how the economy functions. The workers whose wages and benefits are slashed know something about the economy that differs from the insight of mainline economists. These insights counter common-sense epistemology, which assumes that the clearest view is either from the top or from a neutral position—the latter of which, as we have seen, does not exist. Furthermore, these insights push beyond the sort of projections and wishful thinking that prevent those on the top from seeing what is really going on where the rubber hits the road. A fundamental challenge emerges here that goes beyond the regular sort of challenges, which merely seek to add another perspective on top of conventional perspectives. Conventional perspectives in both theology and economics, which are usually top-down perspectives, need to be rethought from the bottom up.
Context thus becomes an important aspect of theological and economic reflection—but not any context will do. In the Judeo-Christian theological traditions, what matters is the context that is chosen by the divine: this context, as it is described in many parts of the Bible, is with an insignificant people in the Middle East, rather than with the established empires of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, or Persians; with people in exile; with the poor and downtrodden of whom the prophets of the eighth century BCE spoke; with the “least of these,” who are the companions of Jesus; with the persecuted churches of early Christianity; and with struggling people ever since (Matt 11:28). In addition, this bottom-up context is also for the most part the context of the religious leaders in these traditions (a fact which is often overlooked): patriarchs, prophets, kings, the priests, bishops, elders, apostles, and Jesus’ disciples are all located in bottom-up contexts to varying degrees.
Economists might find this structure attractive because it could contribute to creating the sort of economy from which everyone would benefit, not just the chosen few. There is now an alternative to operating from the top down, to trusting without evidence that a rising tide will lift all boats and that the growing wealth amassed at the top will eventually trickle down. As these mainline models are failing us, considering the plight and the struggles of those on the bottom of the system could lead to a new beginning. Paying attention to those on whose shoulders the current economy rests—workers, in particular, but also all others who bear an inordinate share of its burdens, including those who get stuck in what economists consider the necessary quota of unemployment—would make a tremendous difference. What if economists understood that bankers, stock brokers, stockholders, CEOs, CFOs, managers, presidents, and board members are all located in this bottom-up context as well, whether they realize it or not? This is not to say that theology has all the answers and that it could provide neatly detailed blueprints for economics; but theology can help rethink fundamental matters of perspective and of that which ultimately matters, thus sparking some new research both in its own field and in the field of economics.
These reversals—moving from the bottom up rather than from the top down—do not require a naïve understanding of human nature or unbridled optimism. The energy for change does not have to be produced by some heroic leader but exists already at the bottom, produced in the processes of repression discussed in the previous chapter. This energy at the bottom is often missed, not only because those on the top fail to recognize it, but because it cannot easily be harvested for their projects. People may drag their feet when they get the impression that their work produces results mostly for others’ benefit, rather than for that of themselves and their families. If workers do not benefit from their work, their energy goes elsewhere. However, when people begin to reap more of the benefits of their work, they are willing to put more effort and creativity into their work. While free-market economics has understood this phenomenon, to a certain extent, at the level of economic leadership—most leaders are highly motivated because they reap some benefits from what they do—this insight has not “trickled down” to the level of the workers, whose wages and benefits continue to be slashed, increasingly robbing them of motivation.
This is not to mean that a few mild concessions to workers would suffice. The levels of motivation, effort, and creativity will rise according to the levels at which workers are able to truly participate in their work and benefit from it, to the point that ownership of the means of production may have to be reconsidered in economic theory. When that latter question is broached, of course, it is commonly assumed that the ruling class and management must be the losers, but this is not necessarily true. The biggest surprise of a bottom-up movement may be that it benefits everyone: if all contribute their best efforts, the project as a whole will benefit. Such a dynamic could be seen, for instance, when Argentinean workers took over some of the factories that were supposed to be closed in the early 2000s: by increasing their efforts, by collaborating, and by assuming roles of leadership, they were able to save some of their factories. Unfortunately, owners and management often returned after the workers had saved their businesses, and refused to acknowledge the accomplishment of the workers.27 What if the owners and the management of a factory that was saved by its workers had entered into a new relation with the workers, where workers gained some level of leadership and ownership, and what if the owners had made their expertise available for the good of all?
As noted earlier, the basic problem at the intersection of theology and economics is not that both espouse hopes and desires, and that both presuppose images of God and of ultimate reality. The basic problem has to do with the question of whether or not those hopes and desires are adequate and support life not just for a few, but for everyone. No matter what the prophets of prosperity may say, God does not guarantee the unlimited economic success of God’s people in a capitalist system. In fact, faith that follows Jesus leads in a different direction, not “up” but elsewhere: “out into the roads and lanes” (Luke 14:23). Religion and economics, turned upside down, bring us back to the logic of downturn, which provides a new perspective on God that is more in touch with the God of the Bible because it is in touch with the people on the underside. The hope and desire that grow from this alternative view of God produce resistance and open up alternatives that the current economic elites do not want us to see.
In the midst of long-term downturn, the top-down view of God becomes questionable. In Europe, for instance, members of the working class, who have collectively experienced the pressures of the system since the beginning of industrialization, are often atheists. What they reject, however, are not necessarily all images of God, in general, but certain well-established forms of theism manifest in the established churches, which have a long history of backing up the status quo and of identifying God with the powers that be. Here is an interesting parallel to early Christianity, where this situation was reversed. Early Christians were considered atheists as well, and for good reasons. Not only did they refuse to affirm the gods of the Roman Empire; their God who died on a cross clearly did not match the requirements of classical theism. From the Latin American perspective, Assmann and Hinkelammert affirm this sort of atheism, arguing that it is necessary when dealing with the god of the market; only by declaring themselves atheists in terms of the god of the market can people believe in the Christian God.28 This was also the reality of the workers in a small industrial town in Switzerland in the early decades of the twentieth century, and this reality changed the history of Christian theology when it led theologian Karl Barth, as their pastor, to the insight that God is indeed “Wholly Other”: not the god of the theism of the status quo but the God who transforms the world from the bottom up in Jesus Christ. In Barth’s somewhat mystifying language: “He whose nature and essence consist, whose existence is proved, in His descending into the depths [in Jesus Christ], He the Merciful, who gives Himself up for His creature to the utter depths of the existence of His creature—He is God in the highest.… the highness of God consists in His thus descending.”29
The perspective from below challenges a tendency towards spiritualization that exists in both theology and economics. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are right when they argue that “economics, if it is to be a science, has to return to something closer to the ancient Greek meaning of the term and take all of social life into consideration.” This includes taking into account, for instance, “the new common anthropology and the intellectual and affective power of productive labor.”30 In addition, the view from the bottom up needs to take into account not just management and workers, but also those forced to live in abject poverty and those who are now completely excluded from the global economy because they have nothing to contribute. In Christian theology, a similar argument can be made for taking all of social life into consideration, since the reality of God relates to all of life, including the interests of economics.31 A deep concern for the material world is a common, though often neglected, thread in Christian theology; it goes back to the Jewish traditions, where Godself creates heaven and earth and reaffirms this commitment to the material world and its rhythms once and for all after the Great Flood (Gen 8:21–22). It is often overlooked that, in the Hebrew Bible, the concern of theology is not the divine as it relates to nonmaterial realities or an afterlife (an idea that appears only very late in the history of this literature) but life in this world and its well-being. Spirituality, in this context, is inextricably bound up with the material at every turn, and this is the ground on which Christianity rests as well.
Justice in Economics and Religion
As we have seen, the success of the market is not just based on the exploits of capital; labor makes much more significant contributions than mainline economists acknowledge. Capital, itself, is ultimately produced through labor, a fact that the bubble economies of recent years have increasingly covered up. Unless labor is honored for its contributions to the economy, wealth keeps trickling up, not down. This raises the question of justice.
In neoclassical free-market economics, justice is often applied as a formal principle. Arguments against a progressive tax, for instance, according to which the wealthy are taxed at higher rates, are based on a formal understanding of justice as fairness. Those who follow this model of justice tend to prefer a flat tax or flat-rate tax, which treats everyone equally, so that the wealthiest and the poorest would pay exactly the same percentage of income as a tax. Free-market economics is often based on this particular understanding of justice, as well, as exemplified by economist Friedrich von Hayek’s critique of the notion of “social justice.” Justice, according to von Hayek, means “the fair and impartial application of legal, moral and perhaps customary rules.” If this kind of fairness is not guaranteed, according to von Hayek, the world is turned upside down: “Precede [the word ‘justice’] with the word ‘social’ and everything changes. Social justice may require redistributing property and treating people unequally. In this way the word ‘social’ empties the nouns it is applied to of their meaning.”32 At first sight, many people would agree with von Hayek that “treating people unequally” cannot promote justice—only fairness can do that, by “treating everyone exactly alike.”
The free market can be understood as the ultimate arbiter of this sort of justice, since here everyone appears to be treated the same. Everyone needs to compete, and, in the ideal state of the market, there are no special conditions for anyone. All participants in the market are considered to be equal. This is not the case, of course, in the real world. There is a substantial difference between large and small participants in the market. Not all participants in the market are equal, for instance, if the government steps in as a matter of course when large corporations are in trouble in order to save them. This is not only the case with the bailouts of the largest corporations, which began with the financial sector in 2008 and 2009. Some worry that this will be part of a new set of policies adopted by the Obama administration, but similar steps were taken under previous administrations as well. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, for instance, the Bush administration endorsed substantial support to embattled corporations, like the airlines and others which were affected by the fallout of the terrorist attacks. In addition, large corporations often get special deals, like tax breaks and governmental subsidies for their projects. It may seem paradoxical, but proponents of the free market have been among the strongest supporters of such programs. Even the so-called free-trade agreements, like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), contain many stipulations intended to boost the position of the most powerful players in the market. Chapter eleven of the NAFTA agreements even allows corporations to sue the governments of Canada, the United States, and Mexico for compensation if any of their policy decisions have a negative impact on their investments.33 Liberalization of the trade of agricultural products with Mexico, to name another example, was skewed in favor of U.S. farmers, who receive substantial subsidies from the U.S. government. The result was substantial downward pressure on the price of corn in Mexico, which is often produced by small farmers. There does not appear to be much of a level playing field for all participants in the market.
Yet even if market relations were fair and balanced, and no special deals were made that give preferential treatment to the more powerful participants in the market—this is the situation that Adam Smith envisioned and that the textbooks presuppose—significant problems remain. The equal treatment of unequals may well be the greatest injustice of all, especially in situations of severe power differentials.34 When, in the ideal situation of the free market, unequals are made to compete on level ground, the outcome can easily be predicted. Children perhaps understand this problem better than adults, especially those who are in a position to view things from the perspective of the disadvantaged. A five-year-old child, for example, intuitively understands why a race where the same rules apply to a five-year-old and an eleven-year-old cannot be considered to be just; treating a five-year-old and an eleven-year-old exactly alike in a competitive situation would indeed be the greatest injustice of all. Based on this simple insight, it is not hard to see why a free market, in which significant differentials of power and wealth exist, cannot lead to greater justice for all—certainly not without a strong belief in some invisible hand of the market. This insight is especially important in a situation where large corporations dominate the economic scene. When Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., moves into a community, for instance, small businesses often cannot survive, and they are not supposed to survive; this is part of the business plan. In this case, the free market does not work for small-business owners, due to the advantage of large corporations, which is often intentionally boosted by lowering prices initially until the competition is ruined. What is true in the world of business—as large businesses increasingly take over the territory of small businesses—is also true in the world of labor. In a situation where workers have nothing to sell but their labor, and where they have little other support, the corporations who employ them have a tremendous advantage. This advantage is compounded under the conditions of globalization, when workers are played off against each other on the global scene.
Justice defined as fairness is, therefore, not a helpful concept in situations of grave power differentials. An alternative perspective emerges from those who are the losers in the current situation, like workers, small business owners, and the growing masses of those who cannot find or keep a job in an economy where jobs are increasingly under pressure. This brings us back to the logic of downturn. Here, theology in the Judeo-Christian tradition can make a significant contribution, as many of the traditions on which it builds adopt the perspective of people under pressure and find the divine there.
From the perspective of those who are affected the most by downturn, justice might be redefined as being in solidarity with those who experience injustice and as taking the sides of those who have been marginalized and excluded from the community and from relationship. This is precisely the notion of justice that is most common in the texts of both the Old and the New Testaments. In many biblical texts, justice refers not to the notion of fairness but to a covenant—that is, to a relationship between God and humanity which is dynamic and responsive. This relationship is expressed in terms of God’s faithfulness, which implies God’s special concern for those pushed to the margins of the covenant and for those who are excluded by some who are under the mistaken impression that their way of life is closer to God.35 Justice in the Judeo-Christian traditions has to do, therefore, with a particular concern for the restoration of relationship with those who are excluded from relationships and pushed to the margins of the covenant: the proverbial widows, orphans, and strangers of the Old Testament; and the fishermen, prostitutes, tax collectors, and the sick of the New Testament. In this context, restoration of relationship with the marginalized is not simply a social issue or the moral consequence of faith; rather, the quality of faith, itself, and the relationship with the divine are closely connected to the restoration of relationships among the people, since distortions in relations to others get reproduced as distortions in relations to God, and vice versa.36 This revised notion of justice reshapes the relation of theology and economics in the following ways:
First, justice is now linked to a detailed account of the kinds of pressures that people who do not benefit from the free-market economy have to endure in their lives.37 Viewed from the perspectives of those pushed to the margins, there can be no illusion of equality or a level playing field. As a result, a structural understanding of injustice emerges. From this perspective, there cannot be a grand theory of justice—whether theological or economic—based solely in the world of ideas. This attention to the pressures that people have to endure requires a very close look at the claims of individual achievement in the current economy. Individualism is questioned at the most fundamental level here. Is the wealth of corporate America built single-handedly by a few prominent CEOs, as their compensation packages seems to indicate—or is it, rather, tied to the labor of billions in a globalizing economy who are forced to work under constantly worsening conditions? From the perspective of workers who are pressed to sell their labor for less and less money, the individualism displayed by top-level CEOs is easily exposed as fraud. The challenge for the system is, thus, not to become less individualistic but to become aware of the relationships already in place, to put an end to the cover-up, and to form less asymmetric relationships. This insight has important implications for the relationship to God as well, and here a revised notion of justice holds an important lesson, especially for those in positions of power and control: as they misrecognize their relationship to other people, they are also prone to misrecognize their relationship to God. Neither a well-meaning communitarian approach nor the insistence on equal rights makes much of a difference here—in fact, both communitarianism and equal rights might be harmful since both discourses often cover up the differences in power that produce unjust relationships.38
Second, justice that is aware of power transcends the common focus on distribution and takes into account productivity. Injustice is tied not just to unequal distribution but to the dramatic differences in the valuation of productivity. Thus, justice provides an adjustment of the value attached to various forms of productivity. Such justice is the opposite of the giving of alms, and neither is it primarily concerned about social programs supposed to level the playing field, nor about advocacy for the marginalized. Justice in touch with the lives of those under pressure in a free-market economy leads to a new awareness and valuation of their productivity—and, thus, it might lead also to a new awareness of God’s own mysterious productivity in places where we least expect it, even on a Roman cross. Once the free market’s myth of individualism and fairness gives way to an awareness of actual relationships, the location of true productivity with those who do the actual work in the global economy can be seen. This productivity bears a certain family resemblance to the kind of energy that is set free at the personal level once persons connect with their repressions. Below the surface, at the level of what has been repressed, lie tremendous energies that push toward transformation and justice—not primarily in justice’s punitive or redistributive forms but in the form of creating a space for alternative productivity. It should go without saying that these energies must not be romanticized or idealized.39 We must not forget that our desires are ultimately formed in moments of repression, as Freud noted; any hope for transforming desire needs to take into account these repressions. Elsa Tamez reinterprets Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith in a parallel way, as focusing on productivity: “Insofar as it is by faith and not by law that one is justified, the excluded person becomes aware of being a historical subject and not an object.”40 Such alternative productivity is one of the things that mainline religion is unable to deal with, because it never realizes that the divine is at work from below rather than from above; for similar reasons, mainline economics misses this alternative productivity as well.
Third, justice that takes the sides of those pushed to the margins of the economy is concerned about broken relationships. The restoration of relationships also precedes the more common concern for distribution. The initial step in the context of broken relationships is a search for solidarity. Economic pressures tend to weld together people who are vastly different—including those white-collar employees (often white and male) who are now also experiencing the economic squeeze firsthand. Theologians could be ahead of the game if they realized that the distortion of economic relations is a central issue in both Christianity and other religions—once again, not merely as a social or ethical issue, but also in terms of the distortion of our relation to the divine.41 Community needs to be rebuilt in response to the particular forms in which it has broken down and in terms of where the pressures fuse us together—thus the need to pay close attention to economics as one of the primary matters of life and death, although this is obviously not the only reality that matters. This is the context of the preferential option for the poor, a notion initially developed by Latin American liberation theologians, which has often been misunderstood as a special-interest concern which neglects the interests of the rich. Yet, this was never the intention. A preferential option for the poor includes the rich—those who benefit most from asymmetries and distorted relationships—but it reminds us that they are faced with a particular challenge; the rich are the ones who need all the help (or grace, to use a theological term) that they can get, since they are the ones most beholden to the system and unable to step out of it. The energy and productivity that bubble up from the underside of the economy—God’s own location in Christ’s ministry, death, and resurrection—provide some help by pushing toward justice, not in punitive or retributive ways, but by initiating the transformation of relationships.
Finally, justice understood as solidarity and as taking sides throws new light on our vision of ultimate reality and, thus, on images of the divine. The biblical sources, although not lacking in diversity, converge in various important ways. What many of the biblical notions of justice have in common is their focus on relationship. The Hebrew verb ṣdq means to be faithful to the community established by the covenant.42 The Greek term dikaiosynē, as used in the New Testament, has not eclipsed this emphasis on relationship. Although there is no uniform notion of justice in the New Testament, justice tends to include both the relations between human beings and the relation to God; here is a significant difference to the classical Greek notion of dikaiosynē, which focuses exclusively on the relations between human beings.43 In the works of the prophets of the Old Testament, the term justice specifically addresses the distorted relationships between the rich and the poor, caused by oppressive actions of the rich, who “trample on the poor” (Amos 5:11), an action that also distorts their relationship with God.44 This distortion of relationships by oppression is a concern in various parts of the Bible—the Psalms come to mind as another prominent example45—and can also be found in Jesus’ sayings and other parts of the New Testament. Justice in all of these cases aims at the restoration of relationships with others and with God, and at putting an end to oppression. The primary concern of justice is, thus, not so much helping those in need but overcoming oppressive relationships and learning how to relate differently—both to other human beings and to God. The Apostle Paul’s notion of justification can be seen in a similar light: not simply as a religious transaction but as a manifestation of God’s justice, which resists injustice and reconstructs distorted relationships.46
As a result, justice, as restoring broken relationships, needs to address the power differential between oppressor and oppressed, and is partisan insofar as God sides with those who are trampled underfoot. Gustavo Gutiérrez’s reflections, published three decades ago, match these more recent reflections: “To deal with a poor man or woman as Yahweh dealt with his people—this is what it is to be just.” And: “To be just is to be faithful to the covenant.… Justice in the Bible is what unites one’s relationship with the poor to one’s relationship with God.”47
The image of the divine emerging here is dynamic. A God who favors those whose relationships have been violated can never be pinned down in terms of an abstract notion of fairness. God takes sides for the benefit of all. Christians sometimes get sidetracked by wondering whether we are talking about “spiritual” or “social” processes here: Is this a matter of “social justice” or some other sort of justice? This question is moot, as the biblical traditions do not operate with this division: there is only one justice. If the Judeo-Christian God is God of all things, there is no way to separate those realms.
Religion, Freedom, and Private Property
One of the pillars of the free-market economy is the notion of private property. Freedom is often seen in conjunction with it, defined as the freedom to own private property and the freedom to do with it as one pleases. While the notion of freedom might have the potential to open things up and to relieve both economics and religion of some of their stuffiness, in the context of free-market economics the notion is mainly limited to the freedom of those who own property. This is reflected in the voting laws enacted early on in the United States of America, as only white men who owned property were allowed to vote and, thus, to participate in the budding democracy. Economic status and political rights were seen as related, and democracy was located at the intersection between the two. This situation was remedied in part as voting rights were successively granted to all white men, to African American men, and to women—of course not without substantial struggles. What were never addressed in these developments, though, were the implications a broadening political democracy might have for economics. This has led to a situation wherein economics and politics have drifted apart: while politics has moved in the direction of increased democracy, economics has become less and less democratic. Even the organized voice of workers, which used to uphold some semblance of democracy in economics, has come under increased attack in the past decades.
Some of the problems that are faced in the political arena are related to this lack of economic democracy in obvious ways, like, for instance, matters of campaign financing, which have a significant impact on politics, as the level of funding helps determine the outcome of elections. More worrisome, however, are the problems that are less visible, beginning with powerful political lobbyists and ending with “economic hit men,” who further the causes of economic power concentrated in the hands of a few, not only abroad but—how could such massive power possibly be contained?—at home as well.48 A sense of the challenge of the interests of large corporate property owners to democracy developed early in the United States and was expressed by Thomas Jefferson: “I hope we shall … crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”49
Karl Marx has described the ideal realm envisioned by the free-market economy with great clarity:
This sphere … is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham [individualism]. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each others, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each.
This is the ideal conception of the market and of freedom, which still dominates contemporary economics almost a century and a half later. Unfortunately, this ideal realm, which is “on the surface and in view of all men,” is not the whole of reality. Something else is going on when we look at the relationship of power that is in place here. In the words of Marx: “He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but—a hiding.”50 This scenario depicts an important difference between employers and employees that is not taken into account in the ideal world of mainline economics and that we need to investigate here.
Milton Friedman fervently believed that the introduction of economic freedom—by whatever means necessary—would lead to political freedom and probably to religious and cultural freedom as well.51 The basis of it all is the freedom of the market. Friedman reproduces and endorses the same image that Marx had already identified as an ideal existing only on the surface, without posing deeper questions:
So long as effective freedom of exchange is maintained, the central feature of the market organization of economic activity is that it prevents one person from interfering with another in respect of most of his activities. The consumer is protected from coercion by the seller because of the presence of other sellers with whom he can deal. The seller is protected from coercion by the consumer because of other consumers to whom he can sell. The employee is protected from coercion by the employer because of other employers for whom he can work, and so on. And the market does this impersonally, and without centralized authority.
According to Friedman, the market must be trusted here, because “underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”52 The history of the past thirty years of pursuing this logic tells, of course, another story, as more and more pressures have been put on the shoulders of workers and consumers whose “free choice” is increasingly an illusion. The freedom of which Friedman dreamed rings hollow now.
Friedman sees the enemy of freedom in “the power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority.” Freedom, in his opinion, is established “by removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority,” so that “the market eliminates this source of coercive power.”53 This argument is a common one now in popular discourses in the United States: there is a deep-seated distrust of government and its power. Yet, while the public sector is actively distrusted, trust in the private sector appears to know hardly any limit, even in situations of downturn. Friedman, himself, supports this idea, arguing that political power is centralized in a way that economic power is not, as “there can be many millionaires in one large economy” but not many truly outstanding leaders in politics.54 Several things are overlooked here, however: the current popular sense, supported by Friedman, that governmental power is generally undesirable while private power is generally desirable, is odd. Why should people trust leaders of private business more than leaders of public policy? If anything, the argument should be reversed, since the basis of leadership in private business is diametrically opposed to the basis of leadership in public office: politicians are democratically elected by the people, while business leaders are not. And if one were to accuse a politician of having bought an election by using private funds, this accusation describes what is commonly accepted and seen as desirable in the world of business, where private funds translate directly into leadership and power without public elections. Moreover, those who level the common accusation of corruption in political circles hardly ever investigate who is doing the corrupting. Who might have an interest in corrupting politicians, and possess the means to do so?
In this context, ownership of property and command of capital is the foundation on which everything else rests, but which is neither discussed nor questioned. Theological arguments are often used in support of this situation. Adam Smith, for instance, assumed that the ownership of private property was given directly by God—a sort of deist theological argument, where God made the world once upon a time and then retreated and left things in the hands of humanity. Duchrow and Hinkelammert note other theological foundations: “The absoluteness of modern property does not derive directly from Roman law, but from the secularization of the idea that God is the absolute owner of creation.” Neoscholastic theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries argued that God’s absolute right over property could be conferred on humans. This notion was further developed in the seventeenth century by natural-law theorists like Hugo Grotius.55 Thomas Frank notes the pressing need for divine sanctification of large differentials in property ownership and acquisition: “There is no social theory on earth short of the divine right of kings that can justify a five-hundred-fold gap [in salary] between management and labor.”56
Nevertheless, modern economists following Milton Friedman do not have to make such explicitly theological assumptions. Friedman understands the constructed nature of property rights—a matter that gets more complex when intellectual property is considered from cultural production to biotechnological knowledge, which was not even an option when Friedman initially put his ideas to paper. Today, we should think about property in even broader terms, including the notion of “access.”57 Nevertheless, in Friedman’s discussion of property and freedom, he takes the matter of property for granted, and thus another theological assumption comes in through the back door, as it were: property rights can be assumed to be absolute and nonnegotiable. The examples that Friedman uses presuppose property rights and merely consider cases where these rights are in conflict; for instance, whether one can “deny to someone else the right to fly over my land in his airplane. Or does his right to use his airplane take precedence?”58 When the matter of property becomes problematic—for example, in the creation of a monopoly, which Friedman defines as a situation “when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals have access to it”—Friedman simply shrugs off the problem. Admitting that competition is never perfect, he concludes that “as I have studied economic activities in the United States, I have become increasingly impressed with how wide is the range of problems and industries for which it is appropriate to treat the economy as if it were competitive.”59 Worrying mostly about political coercion as the problem, and playing down the sort of coercion that is connected to the ownership and control of property, Friedman overlooks or hides the problem of what I called, in chapter 1, the “postcolonial empire,” where power is mostly soft rather than hard, and where power is rooted in economic processes that are mostly invisible and under the surface.60 A similar dynamic can be observed in the thought of Friedrich von Hayek, who, as we have seen, defines liberty as “that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as possible in society.”61 In this context, von Hayek states that liberty is more important than democracy. What is overlooked both by Friedman and von Hayek is not only the problem of economic coercion, but the fact that their definition of economic liberty based on property implies coercion—both economic and political—by default.
In this debate, the Judeo-Christian traditions present an alternative to mainline presuppositions about property and freedom once we cut through the distortions. Too often capitalist notions of ownership and freedom are projected onto the divine, and this presents a perfect example of how free-market economics undermines and reshapes Christian theology. Nevertheless, notions of God’s ownership of the world, for instance, are not necessarily seen as rigid in the Judeo-Christian traditions, as the logic of free-market economics would lead us to expect. In the beginning of the Gospel of John, for instance, the statement is made about Jesus that “the world came into being through him,” and that “he came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (John 1:10–11). While ownership is not disputed here, it is not enforced coercively. The notion of God’s freedom also takes a surprising turn in these traditions, as it does not necessarily entail the freedom to do anything. Medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury, for instance, developed a sense of the limit of God’s freedom: once God creates the order of creation, God is bound to it. When something goes wrong and this order is violated, God cannot arbitrarily choose to act as if nothing had happened. Unlike in the later work of Thomas Aquinas, Anselm’s God is not free to do as God pleases; this implies that God is unlike a tyrant, whose power is arbitrary and unrestricted.62 A similar dynamic can be seen earlier, in the biblical records themselves: when God strikes covenants with the people in both the Jewish and the Christian traditions, God limits Godself. Divine freedom in the context of a covenant is not the freedom to do anything; it is, rather, the freedom to maintain constructive covenantal relationships and to live within their boundaries; and it is the freedom to resist the coercion of those who seek to destroy these relationships and who wield power in ways that contradict these relationships because they pursue their own power and profit.
Another alternative tradition is presented by the “year of the Lord’s favor,” which Jesus announces in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 4:19), and during which good news is preached to the poor, release proclaimed to the captives, recovery of sight granted to the blind, and liberation granted to the oppressed (Luke 4:18). This Christian tradition is rooted in ancient Jewish traditions, laid out in the book of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible, which establishes ground rules for the community that come as a surprise to those of us who think of the free-market logic as ultimate rationality: “You shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants” (Lev 25:10). The liberty proclaimed in this “year of jubilee” implies a radical reversal of contemporary economic interpretations of liberty, which protect those who own property. The liberty of the year of jubilee protects those who have been deprived of their property, and it implies a reversal of property rights: “the land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants,” the author of Leviticus has God say (Lev 25:23); land that had to be sold because someone fell “into difficulty” “shall be released” after forty-nine years, “and the property shall be returned” (Lev 25:25–28).63 Divine claims to ownership in this context do not model human claims to ownership, as is often assumed in the theology of the free market, but limit it. This tradition poses a fundamental challenge to mainline notions of private property and freedom, as property is always provisional and preliminary and subject to redistribution in situations of grave imbalances, while freedom only exists when all are free, including those on the bottom of society.
John Wesley pushes the matter even further in his interpretation of the Christian understanding of stewardship. Wesley calls into question a position that claims that God has entrusted private property to us. In fact, he even rejects understanding what God has entrusted to us as a loan, because even such an arrangement does not put enough emphasis on our ongoing relationship with God. In this regard, Wesley’s position is in direct opposition to the later deist defense of private property by Adam Smith. Wesley develops an alternative model that he calls stewardship, which means that “we are … indebted to [God] for all we have; but although a debtor is obliged to return what he has received, yet until the time of payment comes he is at liberty to use it as he pleases. It is not so with a steward: he is not at liberty to use what is lodged in his hands as he pleases, but as his master pleases.”64 As a result, no human being can ever be the absolute owner of anything; not even the analogy of a debtor is appropriate here, because debtors have control over the loan that they have taken out until it is to be repaid. The only basis for having anything, according to Wesley, is an ongoing relationship with God, which constantly provides the focus for the use of what Christians have.65 This implies that those who have things (one hesitates to use the term ownership) do not enjoy the sort of freedom promoted by contemporary free-market economics. Wesley’s interpretation sets clear limits—something that might have been easier two centuries ago when private property did not yet come in the form of the extensive monopolies now represented by large transnational corporations—but it is precisely because private property has taken on such absolute forms and is held in such large pools that Wesley’s reflections are now more relevant than ever.
This train of thought can be extended to God and the notion of divine freedom, pushing beyond Wesley’s statement: Godself is not free to do anything God pleases, as the image of the master might falsely imply. Godself is bound by the covenant, which is concerned about productive relationships that resist exclusion by the dominant groups. The doctrine of the Trinity is helpful here, because it models a relationship of three equals—without hierarchy, oppression, or exploitation.66 But there is more: God’s faithfulness to the covenant implies not only equality but support of those who are excluded or pushed to the margins of the relationship, as we have seen in the previous section on justice. This is the part that is usually left out by those who emphasize the doctrine of the Trinity as a solution to economic problems.67 The surprising conclusion is that, according to core Judeo-Christian traditions, private property and the freedom to do anything one pleases with this property do not even exist at the level of the divine and of ultimate reality.
What are the consequences of such alternative notions of property and of freedom for economic thought? Questioning the common presuppositions about private property and freedom creates new possibilities. If ownership of private property is seen as conditional rather than as absolute, things change. An example of a minor change along these lines might be the German constitution, which states that “property imposes an obligation,” and that property is supposed to serve the common good.68 Freedom, in this case, is not absolute either but is directed toward the common good. Consequently, freedom is only freedom if it results in something that benefits the community. Friedman’s sense that political and economic freedom are closely related, explicitly stated by President Ronald Reagan in the 1982 Economic Report of the President,69 is indeed correct, but in a different way than Friedman and Reagan assumed: if true economic freedom is available only to a few select people at the top, political freedom is skewed as well. If, however, economic freedom is broadened in such a way that it includes everyone, even the poorest of the poor, political freedom benefits as well.
This has implications for property. The property that mattered in the book of Leviticus was land, on which the livelihood of an agrarian society depended. In our situation, land is still important, but it is the ownership of means of production, more broadly conceived, on which the livelihood of people depends. In other words, private ownership of personal items, including cars and even houses, is not the problem here. Private ownership of means of production becomes problematic where it becomes so absolute that it allows for the exploitation of the many by the few who hold it. In this context, one of the most common justifications of the ownership of the means of production needs to be mentioned. If it is not claimed that this ownership is given directly by God, ownership is often justified on the basis of superior performance: those who own substantial shares of the means of production supposedly have earned their ownership. But, as Michael Parenti asked over a decade ago—as if foreseeing what would ensue in the recession in 2008: if this were true, “why must [this ownership] be provided with so many artificial privileges under the law, so many bailouts, subsidies, and other special considerations—at our expense?”70 And why would this ownership class seek advantages in unfair competition or deteriorating conditions of workers, including the systematic destruction of unions?
Too often, even the slightest question about private ownership of the means of production raises the specter of state planning and state-driven communism.71 But this is not the only alternative to what we now call free-market economics. However this situation is resolved, it does not follow that the ownership of means of production must pass from one absolute claim to another. Things begin to change when the relative nature of any form of ownership becomes clear. In this vein, collective ownership of the means of production—or at the very least, more public accountability for those who control the means of production—does not have to be a recipe for totalitarianism; the opposite is the case. If political and economic freedom are indeed related, as all sides in this debate claim, a more open system of ownership can model a more open system of politics that is more truly democratic, and vice versa. If democracy is to be viable in the political arena, some form of democracy also needs to be viable in the economic arena. The problem is that our current mainline economic notions of private property and freedom work against democracy, and that the representatives of these positions blame the political arena rather than the world of economics for a lack of democracy. Two Christian economists, Victor Claar and Robin Kendrick Klay, model this misunderstanding and its implications for various topics: “When a government can take anything it wants from its citizens, there is no incentive to work hard to create anything. Christians should continue to work for economic freedom and social justice throughout the global economy.”72 First of all, why would “government” want to take just anything from its citizens, and who is “government” in a democracy if not the citizens? Second, whose incentive “to work hard” are we talking about? And third, whose freedom is at stake here, and how is this related to social justice?
In searching for alternatives, the free market’s resistance against top-down coercion, which Friedman emphasized, must not be overlooked. Yet, too often this resistance leads to another form of domination that is less visible. The libertarian doctrine for which Friedman stood, and liberal tendencies among economists, in general, trust in the liberating powers of the market. This was perhaps most clearly seen in the 1990s, but will probably be reappearing soon after the rigid Bush years and Obama’s emergency bailouts. Thomas Frank shows, for instance, how in the 1990s the market was seen as a liberating force, which assisted in overcoming stuffy hierarchies. Here, the market is no longer seen as a top-down authoritarian mechanism but as the place of active interchange, diversity, and mutual challenge. This market even integrates diversity and multiculturalism, and there is no predetermined outcome.73 This emphasis on liberty, however, hides the fact that the goal of the free-market economy is the defense of the liberty of the big players in the market, those who own or control the means of production and command capital, rather than the liberty of everyone. This is, ultimately, also the liberty for which U.S. soldiers have fought most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq. This notion of liberty is, however, ultimately an illusion because not even the biggest players are absolutely free: even they need to play according to the rules of the market. Liberty as independence can never be fully achieved.
The freedom that is tied to a covenant, which liberates those who are forced to endure bondage and oppression, is different. It liberates even the divine from the need of absolute control because it is tied to the common good. True freedom does not imply independence, but freedom for a new life in relation with God and other people—including those whom we had not noticed before because our so-called independence was built on their backs.
We cannot do without hopes and dreams. As the hope for the rising tide that lifts all boats vanishes, alternative hopes are emerging in the midst of severe economic pressures. These images of hope include what theologian Johann Baptist Metz (following Walter Benjamin) has called the “dangerous memories” of the church.74 One example of such a dangerous memory, which holds out a different hope, is Jesus’ radical reversal, according to which “the last will be first, and the first will be last.” One of the contexts of this saying, which occurs in various places in the Gospels, is Jesus’ parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt 20:1–16). This parable delivers both a critique of an economic status quo that gives little consideration to the hope of the workers, and provides fresh hope for those affected by the pressures of downturn—a dangerous memory indeed.
What might be the basic hope, the most basic image of God in this global economy, and what is its context? In the work of Adam Smith, self-interest points in the direction of basic ideas of growth and progress. Taking up the standard, Nelson notes that scientific progress is the most vital religion of modernity and that economists are the modern priesthood of the religion of progress.75 While the image of God as the one who guarantees progress can be found in fewer and fewer people’s experience as the free-market economy keeps failing them, this particular experience is still universalized in economic theory and applied to humanity as a whole.76 Even in a situation of downturn, there are still some people who appear to have been richly endowed by the grace of the god of progress and who substantially benefit from the meanderings of the free-market economy. The stories of those people, of the economic elites, and of those who enjoy economic success at any given moment, are well known and also well publicized by the media for good reasons. Even the representatives of the middle classes of the so-called first world are still supposed to believe that the free-market economy works for them, and are taught to gaze admiringly upward rather than to the side at their struggling peers—much less down to their drowning fellow citizens.
Nonetheless, we cannot suppress the rising flood of doubts, as new generations of the middle class gain awareness of the fact that their own standard of living is, and most likely will remain, significantly below that of their own parents. If we look below the middle class, things are much worse yet. The economic progress of the last century has not benefited most of humanity as much as one would expect, not even in the “first world.” The considerable economic progress of the 1990s has not eased the problem, as those who believe in the universality of progress would have expected, but exacerbated it. This is true for many of the so-called developing countries, as globalization has benefited some, but hardly the great masses, yet the fallout can also be observed at home. Economic disasters for the working and even the middle classes rapidly increased during those years—exemplified by a steady downward trend for the weaker members of society, and represented in the trauma of falling real wages, growing debt, growing rates of child poverty, and increasing rates of child homelessness.77
Hope, thus, appears to be a scarce commodity for many people in the contemporary world. Business consultant Peter Senge tries to recapture it with reference to the well-known saying of Jesus about the camel and the needle’s eye, which follows the story of the rich young man who is unable to leave behind his privileged status. In Jesus’ own words, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matt 19:24). According to Senge, this saying refers to a gate in the city wall of Jerusalem called “the needle,” which “was so narrow that when a fully loaded camel approached it, the camel driver had to take off all the bundles before the camel could pass through.” No real challenge is involved here, just a little effort. Senge does not even address the question of wealth; what needs to be unloaded is just inner “baggage we’ve acquired on our journey.”78 This approach to the story of camel and the needle’s eye is common in Christian circles. Some would add that the camel would have to get on its knees to get through the gate. But this misses the point of the story and the reason for hope. The shock of Jesus’ disciples at this saying, expressed in their question, “Then who can be saved?”, is reflected in Jesus’ answer: “For mortals it is impossible” (Matt 19:26). This story is not about a little more humility, or about being less beholden to wealth and letting go. This story is about things that are impossible: camels cannot go through the eyes of needles and rich people cannot be part of God’s kingdom. Yet that is not the final word. Jesus concludes that “for mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible” (Matt 19:26). The passage ends without any further comment. Hope is, thus, rooted in God and not in the actions of rich people. The next paragraph ends with another affirmation that “many who are first will be last, and the last will be first” (Matt 19:30). This hope is not utopian because it is realized in the life and ministry of Jesus and his movement, which is larger than the twelve disciples and includes a variety of people, including some wealthy women (Luke 8:1–3 is the only reference to them), who appear to be living this reversal of last and first.79
While the hope of the free-market economy is rooted in the hope for the ongoing production of economic surpluses—the sort of thing that is produced by labor but today is often hidden in the bubbles created by the market—it might help to talk about another kind of surplus, which finds expression in the traditions of the oppressed, and of which Jesus, Paul, and many others who struggled against the status quo of power and wealth must have been aware.80 Jacques Lacan’s notion of “surplus-enjoyment” refers to a sort of energy that is available only to the repressed—at the underside—and not to those who are part of the status quo.81 Hardt and Negri talk about a similar phenomenon in this way: “The production of the common always involves a surplus that cannot be expropriated by capital or captured in the regimentation of the global political body. This surplus, at the most abstract philosophical level, is the basis on which antagonism is transformed into revolt. Deprivation, in other words, may breed anger, indignation, and antagonism, but revolt arises only on the basis of wealth, that is, a surplus of intelligence, experience, knowledges, and desire.”82 In other words, the oppressed and marginalized are not limited to a role as the ones who are excluded, fragmented, and confronted with a lack; they have their own sort of wealth. To be sure, this wealth is not recognized by the system, and so there is a certain niche or safe space that opens up. Based on this alternative surplus, the way resistance and activism are conceived changes substantially. A substantial part of the work of resistance happens in the context of everyday work and in the networks in which we live our daily lives—the sort of additional meetings during people’s spare time on which much activism today depends are still important, but their focus needs to be on the better organization of resistance in daily life rather than on an extraordinary number of extraordinary activities.83
At this point, a religious surplus comes into view. If God is not forced into the role of the guarantor of private property or of the surplus of the free-market economy, God can be conceived in alternative ways. If the divine cannot be controlled by the free market, its manifestations keep bubbling up despite the system’s best efforts to subdue them. In my book Christ and Empire, I talk about a “theological surplus” or a “christological surplus.” If people cannot ultimately be controlled, does it not make sense to consider the possibility that there is a divine reality that cannot be controlled either? The difference, of course, is that this alternative kind of surplus is produced on the underside. It is linked to particular acts of repression in a repressive system. The theological surplus is produced in the context of top-down repression, which generates not just the commonly acknowledged pressure but also a surplus from which resistance grows. The economic empire, itself, without being aware of it, thus creates the conditions for a new thing. For good reasons, union organizers have a saying that “the boss is our best organizer.” This alternative surplus emerges precisely in those places where the free market least expects it. But once these places are recognized as genuine places for the creation of alternatives, new energies and resources are discovered.
This perspective challenges us to question the images of God presupposed by the global free-market economy one last time. The most important question has to do with our blind spots.84 What is repressed and overlooked when we follow the god of economic progress? This is the place where theology needs to enter into a critical dialogue with economics. Of course, theology cannot render judgment out of nowhere, as if it existed in a vacuum or in a realm of ethereal bliss; rather, theology, itself, needs to be judged according to its own embodied forms, in communities that are interconnected with growing global experiences of downturn and the all-pervasive logic of free-market economics.85 Even the kind of theology which intends to be purely “traditional,” working exclusively with classical concepts, needs to be examined for how it is now shaped by the current ideology of the market. Of course, since these influences are located mostly at the subconscious level, theologians are not usually aware of them. Even the most classical theological confessions—for instance, such as the confession that “Jesus is Lord”—can become confessions of the market; the notion of Jesus’ lordship is easily subverted and assimilated to the images of those who rule the free-market economy, without anyone noticing the heresy. Absolute and abstract images of God that cannot be questioned—the kinds of images that are produced from the top down, from positions of power and control—create problems both in the life of the church and in the life of the free-market economy. Not only can they not be critiqued, they commonly function as Trojan horses that introduce and activate their cargo in secret, which makes them even more powerful and dangerous. As a result, absolute images of God lead to an absolute church; an absolute market; an absolute surplus, which is calculated as the bottom line; and, thus, to institutions that can no longer be questioned and challenged. Images of God produced from the bottom up, on the other hand, tie into a different surplus—not the one that can be calculated as the bottom line and controlled, but the one that knows that it is born in a particular struggle and under particular pressures, always fragile and limited, but also full of energy and passion.
At the end of this chapter, reenvisioning the lordship of Christ opens up new perspectives both on God and on the world, and on the connection between the two. The early Christians knew just as well as the Roman Empire that there could not be two lords: Caesar and Jesus. A decision had to be made between the two, and hence between two fundamentally different ways of being lord. The difference was not between spiritual and material but between different forms of power: top down vs. bottom up (Matt 4:8–10); between different forms of relating to others: mutuality and service vs. control (Mark 10:35–45); between different ways of being effective: collaboration vs. domination (Mark 9:38–41); and between different ways of relating to the divine: modesty vs. pride (Luke 1:46–55). And, since the alternative politics of Christ’s lordship cannot be separated from economics, a different form of economics takes shape from these attitudes: fulfilled labor that parallels God’s own redemptive work vs. exploited labor (Matt 11:25–30); cooperative labor vs. competitive labor (Mark 10:35–45); regard for all labor vs. preference for management (Mark 9:33–37); solidarity with others who labor vs. solidarity based on kinship and privilege (Mark 3:31–35); labor that addresses need vs. labor that follows the rules of the status quo (Mark 2:23–28); regard for those who work and, thus, walk the walk vs. regard for those who merely talk the talk (Matt 21:28–32, 25:31–46).
To be sure, these alternatives cannot always be had without conflict, as Mary, the mother of Jesus, knew. In her own words, spoken at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke and based on an even more ancient source,86 she claims that the God who “has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant”—an unwed mother who had to produce her own livelihood—has “lifted up the lowly.” This is as far as mainline religion usually takes things. Lifting up the lowly, and, perhaps, accepting those who are different to some degree, is only one side of this struggle, however. In conjunction with lifting up, Mary also notes that God “has brought down the powerful from their thrones.” And, as if this were not enough, this God has also “sent the rich away empty” as he “has filled the hungry with good things” (Luke 1:48; 52–53). God, thus, takes a stand once again on the side of the lowly, reversing mainline political, economic, and theological logic.
What about the powerful and the wealthy, then? What about those who own major shares of the means of production and who command capital? Is there no hope for them? There is hope if we understand how things are connected in the global free-market economy—to a degree that might have surprised the ancients. The current situation harms not only those pushed to the margins but everyone. In relationships of oppression, not only the oppressed but also the oppressors are damaged. This is, of course, true for any situation of oppression, and Mary is aware of this in her own ways—but this insight is even more crucial in our own time, when oppression has become so blatant that more than twenty-five thousand children continue to die every day of hunger and preventable causes87 while the oppressive structures become not only less and less visible but are celebrated in terms of the rising tide that will lift all boats. How can the humanity of the wealthy, who build their enormous fortunes on the back of large parts of humanity, not get damaged in this context? How can the humanity of employers who keep reducing the wages and benefits of their workers in order to increase their margins of profit not be affected? If this is correct, it may be a good thing for the powerful to be brought down from their thrones. This may be their only chance to learn how to become fully human. Perhaps it is also a good thing for those who are full to be sent away empty in order to be forced to think about what really matters in life.
My students often draw the conclusion that if God deals with the powerful and the wealthy, as Mary says in the Gospel of Luke, God does not really care about them. But that is a mistake. The opposite is true: God cares so much about the powerful and the wealthy that God takes some unpopular steps in order to bring them back to the right way. That’s what it takes to make sure that new hope can truly flourish for everyone.