After the Market: Economics, Moral Agreement, and the Churches' Mission

Anglican Theological Review, Summer 2006 by Luke, Iain

After the Market: Economics, Moral Agreement, and the Churches' Mission. By Malcolm Brown. Religions and Discourse series, vol. 23. Bern: Peter Lang, 2004. 324 pp. $62.95 (paper).

Despite its title, After the Market is neither a critique' of the market system nor even primarily a book about economics. Its central theme is the nature and possibility ol moral discourse in a fundamentally pluralistic context. Market structures (unction as a "test case," since they throw into sharp relief the strengths and weaknesses of two moral languages, liberalism and communitarianism.

Brown holds that neither language is adequate for public theology: the former subordinates Christian principles to the paradigm of capitalist democracy, while the latter, in its theological guise as confessionalism, disengages the church from genuine economic and political debate. After a detailed cross-examination of these two traditions. Brown proposes an alternative vehicle for theological discourse in a pluralist society, which he calls dialogical traditionalism.

This model attempts to draw on the strengths of both its precursors, recognizing the role of communities in the moral formation of individuals but acknowledging that individuals encounter and interact with one another in the marketplace. Christians, in particular, have a mandate from within their tradition for such interaction, which may appropriately result in an "enlargement" of Christian theology, rather than its victory or defeat at the hands of a rival narrative (p. 77).

En route to this destination, the author handles liberal and communitarian viewpoints mainly by way of illustration, with Preston, Novak, Thiemann, and Stackhouse ranged as proponents on one side, Milbank, Hauerwas, Banner, and Duchrow on the other, and with homage to MacIntyre throughout. This approach masks a certain lack of definition in the basic terms: "liberal" can include the almost polar opposition of Preston and Novak, while "communitarian" tends to involve an idealized and intangible concept of church, at some distance from any real community. Yet Brown also offers substantive and fair critique of both schools, pointing to the paradox of a liberal "tradition" whose goal is to transcend tradition, and to the irony involved in confessional distancing from the very politics of pluralism that permits confessional traditions to survive (p. 177).

Although they are not central to the argument, Brown's reflections on market economics provide food for thought. He is rare among theologians in recognizing economists' insights into vital theological concepts such as finitude, scarcity, and contingency. This affirmation becomes uncritical at a number of points, however, when Brown attributes (without explanation) a moral or theological rationale to Thatcherism (pp. 20, 40, 50), or overlooks a minority view among economists that scarcity is indeed a "social construct" (p. 175). Even his statement of the consensus that the market is about process, not outcomes (p. 16), misses some interesting recent thinking (for example, by Amartya Sen) about whether that distinction can be sustained.

In the closing chapters, the market also reappears as a potential forum for the practice of dialogical traditionalism. The author draws on his own experiences with the Church of England's Industrial Mission and Board of Social Responsibility, and the Work and Economy Network of the European Churches. A brief description and analysis of these movements provides an empirical balance to a methodology which is otherwise idealist and places the work as a whole within recent trends in practical theology.

Brown leaves some questions unasked and others unanswered, but this seems in keeping with an agenda of engendering dialogue: his arguments could be more fully developed, for example, by encounters with Roman Catholic social teaching, full-blooded secular liberalism, or the North American context. Even as it stands, the- book will challenge practitioners of social advocacy in the church, along with those who reflect on the theology and ecclesiology of mission, to enter into that dialogue.

IAIN LUKE

St. John's College

Winnipeg, Manitoba