Divine Economy: Theology and the Market

Christian Century, March 27, 2002 by Daniel Rush Finn

The reason almost all modern Christians have changed their view of usury is that in the modern world we regard money as like the house, not the wine. Money is a claim on assets, and such a claim is indeed productive, whether I have temporary use of it for a year or, in these days of money-market funds, even for 24 hours.

The original biblical prohibition against usury was intimately tied to concern for the poor, because most borrowing in an agricultural society occurred out of desperation. Aquinas, however, dealt with the concerns of poverty through his doctrine of property, while his usury prohibition was based on a wholly different argument. If Aquinas were alive today, he could maintain his usury theory intact and come to a different conclusion: that interest on a money loan can be perfectly moral. Long seems to have overlooked this fundamental argument of Aquinas, and as a result claims that Aquinas's analyses of usury and property require the insights of revelation to complete them.

In the most general sense, of course, Aquinas stresses that all of human knowing and living requires a relation to God in faith for its ultimate completion. But Aquinas's treatment of these concrete economic problems without using insights from revelation indicates that Long has badly overstated his case.

The outcome of all of this is that, unlike Long, Dempsey and most other modern Christians understand social science as separate from but complementary to theology. Though the social sciences did not exist in the pre-modern world, their appearance as independent inquiries is a reasonable development within the tradition of natural-law ethics. Long wants to employ the perspective of Aquinas but demote the natural law, which is like trying to be a Lutheran without relying on the Bible.

LIKE HAUERWAS, Long holds out little hope that the structures of the contemporary world can be transformed into anything approaching an acceptable outcome. This leads to a view of the church that will appear sectarian to most other Christians. However, members of the radical orthodoxy movement resist that label. They see the living out of a faithful life in the church as potentially transformative in the sense that others will--it is hoped--take notice of this attractive alternative and be drawn to it. According to Long, the church should "re-present in history a form of life that is good, true, and beautiful"--something he's sure the world has given up on.

Economic exchanges, Long says, are "to be narrated as liturgical performances within the church rather than commodity transactions solely relegated to the market." He notes that it will be difficult to convince businesses to alter their self-conception and become nonprofit organizations but argues that, for Christians, exactly this transformation must occur. "Natural laws" alone will not provide a basis for political economy. Rather, "a theological poetics must seek to make possible" the encounter with God in economic life.

Long cites only one example of what all this might look like--and it comes on the penultimate page of the book. He celebrates the way one farmers' market in a church parking lot transforms the typically "anonymous and impersonal exchanges" into interactions characterized "by friendship and personal relations." Many readers will yearn for more substantive examples of this vision before being tempted to put much stock in it.