Only Christianity can save economics

William Cavanaugh ABC Religion and Ethics 15 Apr 2011

Faith in economic growth is not just a material but a spiritual aspiration, an attempt to get beyond damnable servitude to material reality, and to overcome human vulnerability and limitation Credit: BananaStock (Thinkstock)

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Comments (40) Christians who have tried to make sense of the financial crisis that shook so many of the economies of the northern hemisphere - and whose aftershocks continue to be felt today in the United States and Europe - by putting it all down to the age-old sin of greed are not wrong.

There certainly was plenty of covetousness for material goods and wanton profiteering driving the crisis. Nevertheless, I want to argue, from a Christian perspective, that there is a deeper and more accurate explanation that runs in the opposite direction. The financial crisis was not driven by materialism so much as by a desire to transcend material constraints. To put it another way, far deeper than the desire for more "stuff" is the desire to overcome the limitations of the material world, of the human body and of death, and thus to be free from the scarcity and risk and dependence of a life that is materially based. This desire to transcend material limitations is perhaps most powerfully reflected in the multiple ways that the global economy has gotten detached from reality. The ubiquitous practice of maximum leveraging is basically an attempt to build assets out of debt - which is to say, out of nothing at all. This creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing, is built entirely on perception. As with any pyramid scheme, it can be maintained only as long as the perception of growth is maintained. But once the illusion is lifted, the fall from unreality to reality can be very painful, and wreak havoc in the real world. Before I suggest how Christian theology can help in such a situation, it is important first to grasp the prevailing economic paradigm as a kind of spirituality. There are three kinds of limits that the prevailing economic paradigm tries constantly to overcome. Scarcity Scarcity is said to be a central problematic for the discipline of economics. It is based on the idea of unlimited desires facing limited resources. For classical economists, economics will always be tragic because there will never be enough to satisfy all human wants. The infinite nature of human want is thus constrained by the finite nature of material resources. But the so-called "financialisation" of the economy can be seen as an attempt to overcome the limits of the material world by making wealth multiply without any increase in real material production. Economists have been worried since the end of the post-war capitalist boom in the 1970s that growth and profitability have stagnated, because of overproduction, the high price of oil and the physical limits on growth that ecological reality has imposed. Financialisation is thus an "escape route," as Walden Bello puts it, an attempt to make money out of nothing when the real material economy runs up against its limit. Much of the growth in the economy in the past few decades has been in the financial sector itself. One of the problems is, of course, that it is not real growth. It creates profit for some but not new value. Profit depends on getting in early on speculative bubbles that inevitably burst, because they are based on perception, not reality.

We have been sold on the imperative of economic growth at all costs. Such faith in growth is not just a material but a spiritual aspiration, an attempt to get beyond our damnable servitude to material reality, and so overcome human vulnerability and limitation. Risk At first glance, one might mistakenly think that this type of highly leveraged economy embraces risk and vulnerability, that there is a certain recklessness to it, and that the whole financial system thrives on danger and insecurity. But, in fact, the financial crisis was built on an attempt to defer risk or pass it along to someone else. There is certainly an attempt to profit from risk and vulnerability in this economy - high-risk borrowers were given loans with few safeguards. But securitisation was precisely the attempt to pass risk along to someone else. There was no attempt, as in some forms of lending, to enter into a relationship of shared risk between lender and borrower. The whole point was short-term profit and the quick passing off of loans to others before the true risks became apparent. The system is thus based on the fantasy that people can be free from vulnerability, that profit itself can be made risk-free. Governments around the world have helped to perpetuate this fantasy. Their role in the crisis was to absorb risk, to bail out the most reckless with borrowed money, which is only to defer the consequences of risk to some later time. What investors and consumers seem to want from their elected politicians is to provide the opportunity to avoid reality for as long as possible, to live on value borrowed from the future. And to live on value borrowed from the future is, at bottom, an attempt to cheat death. Trust I would argue that the financial crisis was built not simply on a failure of trust, but more fundamentally on the attempt to overcome the necessity of trust. The reason that loans needed to be insured is that they were made between parties who lacked a basic sense of trust in each other. Any idea that loans depend on some kind of relationship in trust over time has vanished from the current economic model. Money can, quite frankly, be made much more quickly if the necessity of trust is done away with. More than this, profit can be made from distrust itself, by offering to guarantee loans between mutually suspicious parties. Even more still, money can be made in the swaps market from other people's failures. Not only is it unnecessary to trust in another's ability to succeed, but one can actively wish for and even abet the other's failure, and profit from it. From a spiritual point of view, what we are seeing here is an aspiration to freedom, understood negatively as freedom from obligation to others. The kind of relationships of dependence that limit human freedom, the necessity of community and reliance upon others, the stasis of an economy restricted to local, face-to-face encounters - these are seen as

outmoded remnants of the economies of traditional societies and have no place in the contemporary economy. I have concentrated thus far on the most recent crisis of "financialisation," but the quasiGnostic tendencies that I have identified - the various forms of this longing to transcend the limitations of the material world - have been aspirations of the prevailing economic system for much of the twentieth century. Consumerism is famously prone to fantasy, most obviously in marketers' mostly successful attempts to associate mundane products with transcendent qualities like independence, status, sexual ecstasy, youth and freedom from necessity. The modern American "dream house" is precisely so-called because it is not so much a material thing but a marvel of transcendence of the material. Water, heat, cooling, communication, information and entertainment appear at the touch of a button, while waste enormous quantities of it - magically disappears. The ecological consequences of this type of life are hidden, and excluded from the prices we pay. Products simply appear on store shelves for our consumption, without our having to labour to produce them or to even know who produces them and how. Globalization has long since removed actual material production from our sight and located it in some spectral periphery of grateful poor people who are just happy to have jobs. Transnational corporations not only seek to transcend the local, shifting from place to place in search of the cheapest labour and most lax environmental laws. As Naomi Klein says, they also seek to transcend the material world, to concentrate on brand management while leaving the "loathsomely corporeal" process of manufacturing to subcontractors. Creation So what does the Christian doctrine of creation have to say about these aspirations? I want to begin by recognizing two basic features of Christian thinking on creation. First, material reality is good. Second, material reality is limited. Both of these truths issue logically from the fact of creation. Creation has some share in the goodness of God by virtue of the fact that it relies upon the being of God for its being. If God is all good, then the creation of God must also be good. God declares it to be so over and over in the first chapter of Genesis. And yet precisely because creation is created, it is not Creator. It occupies a place on the far side of a yawning gap between Creator and creation. Creator and creation are not on a continuum of being, the latter emanating from the former. They are entirely different, wholly other to each other, as cause and caused. Creation is limited by virtue of being created. The Christian doctrine of creation therefore approaches material reality with a profound realism and humility, a recognition of the limited and dependent nature of creation.

At the same time, however, because it also recognizes that creation is good, there is no need to try to transcend reality and try to escape our creatureliness. To be a creature of a good God is a condition to rejoice in, not rebel against. Finitude is not a condition from which we need to be saved because creation is not a falling away from God. The creation of something besides God is the beginning of a great, if tempestuous, love story, an erotic attraction of Creator and creature. Creation is not a one-time event, but a continuous and intimate sustaining of the creature in being. Thomas Aquinas stresses the absolute ontological divide between Creator and creature. God is not a thing in the universe, but is the sheer act of existence itself. Yet precisely because they do not compete for space, as it were, on the same level, the Creator and creature share the deepest intimacy. Because God must constantly cause being in each creature, and because being is "innermost" in each thing, Aquinas reasons that "God is in all things, and innermostly." Creation produces both the greatest divide and the greatest intimacy between Creator and creatures. And "creatures" means not just human beings, but every material thing that has being. Christians are often puzzled or bored or indifferent when confronted by the Torah's obsessive concern with regulating every aspect of Israelite life. Does the holy book really need to tell us what to do when one ox gores another (Exodus 21:35-6)? Why are bald eagles detestable to eat (Leviticus 11:13), but bald locusts are just fine (Leviticus 11:22)? The details of such passages might need some sorting out, but the overall point should not be missed: the Old Testament writers had an abiding concern with the materiality of life. There simply was no distinction to be made between spiritual concerns and material concerns. The realm of the material is not just an inert and indifferent means to spiritual aspirations. The salvation of the whole community is worked out not in some interior dialogue with God, but in the everyday interactions with the material world. All of creation is to be brought into conformity with God's will. As Ellen Davis points out in her stunning new book Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, the law codes of the Old Testament - unfortunately one of the most neglected parts of the Bible for Christians - are meant to habituate a deep awareness of, and rootedness in, one's particular physical surroundings. The land, the trees, the birds and animals, all are meant to fit within the harmonious order willed by God. Work, eating, worship, sex, even what to do with one's waste are all linked together in such a way that the life of the community with God is meant to fit into the actual physical landscape that the people inhabit. There is no divide between spiritual and economic matters, and the biblical writers would have found any such divide to be perverse or completely unthinkable. They recognized that there is a "spirituality" embedded in all kinds of economic practice, whether we acknowledge it or not.

For Christians, the erotic unity of God and material creation is affirmed in Jesus Christ. As Karl Barth argues, we do not begin with the reality of the physical world and then deduce that there must have been a creator. There is nothing given about the material world. Some traditions stress the unreality of the material and the need to escape it. Barth says that we only know the reality of the material world through Jesus Christ, whose reality affirms that God does not want to exist alone. As Barth says, "Because God has become man, the existence of creation can no longer be doubted." Here Barth is following the path blazed by Irenaeus in his controversies with the Gnostics, whose extreme pessimism about material reality caused them to posit a dualism between a supreme God, the God of Jesus Christ, who was responsible for the invisible spiritual universe, and a lesser God, or demiurge, identified with the God of the Old Testament, who was responsible for creation. Irenaeus strongly reaffirmed the doctrine of the incarnation and thereby affirmed the unity between the God of creation and the God of Jesus Christ. Against the docetic tendencies of the Gnostics, who could not affirm that Jesus Christ did indeed take on loathsome human flesh, Irenaeus argues that the Word was made flesh, "which had been derived from the earth, which He had recapitulated in Himself, bearing salvation to His own handiwork." Irenaeus thus links creation and salvation, affirming at once the goodness of creation which came through Jesus Christ the Word, and the final consummation of that creation in the union of the one true God and material creation in the incarnation. Irenaeus finds harmony between what Ellen Davis calls the "materialism" of the Old Testament and the central conviction of the New Testament that Jesus Christ is the Word of God made flesh. If the Christian tradition from its Jewish roots to its consummation in Jesus Christ is materialistic, however, it is a very different kind of materialism than that with which modernity is sometimes labelled. Biblical materialism does not insist that the material as we know it is all there is, but that we are limited by our being mortal, material creatures in space and time, and we must therefore approach material reality with an attitude of humility. Modern scientific materialism, on the other hand, is the dangerous illusion that all is reducible to the merely material, and that science can eventually overcome any limits that the merely material might put in our way. Davis calls this kind of thinking magical: "For, despite its ostensible grounding in science, this form of materialism is strangely oblivious to what may be the most readily observable and nonnegotiable characteristic of our material world, namely, finitude." Accepting limits

We come, then, to the second important characteristic of the doctrine of creation: material reality, though good, is limited. It is clear from the first creation account in Genesis that all that is, is dependent upon God for its existence. Humans are situated within this ordering of creation, not above it, though being made in God's image does confer a unique status on humans. Humans are made in God's image - only Jesus Christ is the image of God and therefore creator, as Paul's letter to the Colossians makes clear (1:15-16). The image of God is not a quality inherent in human nature. The image of God in humanity can be damaged or obscured, while basic human capacities remain. The image of God is a relational concept - bearing the image of God means being in right relationship with God and with the rest of creation, to know the Creator and to know ourselves as creatures. But as Davis points out, the relation is not just between humans and God - humans are enmeshed in a whole web of relationships with the rest of creation that have their origin in God. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer and many others have noted, the earth in Genesis 1 is a major actor, second only to God. God's gift to the humans of "dominion" over the critters of the earth (Genesis 1:26, 28) is often taken as license to transcend the earth, to stand above it as one who dominates and exploits. But ownership of the land belongs to God and is never to be appropriated for private use, as God makes plain in Leviticus 25:23: "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants." The implication that humans transcend the land is also contradicted by the creation of humans in Genesis 2 from the dust of the ground. Humans are part of the earth and do not stand apart from it. Davis shows how the verbs in Genesis 2:15, commonly translated "to till and to keep" the garden, can be translated "to serve and to observe." Humans are to protect and preserve the land, as well as to learn from it, for our knowledge is finite and must be attuned to our actual material surroundings in order to be in right relationship with the earth and with God. As Davis comments: "Adam comes to Eden as a protector, answerable for the well-being of the precious thing that he did not make; he is to be an observer, mindful of limits that are built into the created order as both inescapable and fitting. The biblical writer does not subscribe to the fantasy that our society has embraced as an ideal - that human ingenuity runs up against physical limits only in order to overcome them." The finite nature of the earth is not just a result of the fall, when Adam is told that the ground is cursed because of him (Genesis 3:17). Indeed, it may be the case that the curse is simply a consequence of Adam's attempt to ignore or defy the limits imposed by material reality. The ground is cursed only insofar as Adam refuses to accept his own finite existence and his own place in the order of creation. The cause of the fall, after all, is the human refusal to

accept the limit established pre-fall by the prohibition on eating from tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The very heart of sin is the temptation to "be like God" - to attempt to deny the limited nature of human existence and cross the divide between Creator and creature. The fall, in other words, is not the fall of humanity into finiteness, but rather the fall is precisely the refusal of humans to accept finite existence as good. At the root of all sin is the attempt to avoid reality. The story of the Tower of Babel completes Genesis' account of the consequences of the human attempt to deny the limits of creation. What is most pertinent for our purposes is the way that scattering is the consequence of humans' attempts to make a name for themselves (Genesis 11:4). Scattering is the result of the human refusal to acknowledge dependence on God or dependence on anyone else. The salvation of the Israelites is their belonging to the Chosen People - to be damned is to be cut off from God and from God's people. If sin is a refusal to acknowledge dependence, then salvation is to gather the scattered into the mutual care of the community. The gathering of Pentecost is thus the reversal of the scattering of Babel. It is of course the Christian hope and assurance that death with not have the final word, and a share in eternal life will be ours. But salvation in Christ is not simply the overcoming of the limits of human existence, especially death. Christ's triumph is a triumph through the cross, an invitation to new life that begins by death to the self. The grain of wheat must fall into the ground and die to have eternal life (John 12:24). To be saved by Christ is to be joined to the suffering body of Christ. We do overcome death, but only insofar as the limits of the small self are overcome in dependence on God and on one another. The limits of the self are overcome by accepting membership in a body where, as Paul says, weakness is clothed with honour, and all suffer and rejoice together (1 Corinthians 12:14-26). Or, in the words of Thomas Merton, "I live to Christ when I die to myself. I begin to live to Christ when I come to the 'end' or to the 'limit' of what divides me from my fellow human being." To speak positively of limits - of scarcity and mutual dependence and shared risk and trust is not to resign oneself to a tragically faulty creation, to accept that we not only have a jealous God but a stingy one to boot. Jesus "came that they may have life, and have it abundantly" (John 10:10). But Jesus talks about abundant life in the context of the sheepfold of which he is shepherd. To live abundantly is not to cut one's self off from relationship with the sheep and the shepherd and the land, to indulge in fantasies of freedom from the care of others and limitless material satisfaction without consequences. Abundant life is accepting the shepherd's love and living in nurturing relationship with all of creation.

In this sense, "scarcity" must mean something different than it does for economists. In economics, scarcity results from the assumption that human desires for finite goods are unlimited. The problem with this assumption is not the idea that goods are finite, but that human desires for such goods are infinite. This is to write greed into the very nature of the human person, and to put all economic activity into a tragic mode where my desires must inevitably be in competition with yours. Scarcity is a valid assumption provided it is based on the recognition of the finite nature of goods, not the insatiability of human desire for finite goods. Our task, as Stephen Long nicely puts it, is to "cultivate a finite desire for finite goods and an infinite desire for the only infinite good - God." Being grounded If we are to practice an economics that embraces both the goodness and the limits of creation, then we must be grounded. If we see ourselves as made from God's breath and the dust of the ground, we will see both ourselves and the material creation as invested with cosmic significance. Our work will be more than an instrumental relationship with the material, more than a means to give flight to our spirits away from this tragically-limited, dependent mortal life. It will be a way of blessing the creation of which God has made us part. Many responses to the current economic crisis have advocated a greater role for the state in regulating markets. While I acknowledge that some types of state intervention can prevent some of the worst types of abuse, I don't think that we should put too much faith in the state to save us. The interests of state and corporation have become too closely intertwined to expect the state to rein in the corporation. The state has instead taken on the role of enabler - the state is there to pick up the pieces when reckless market behaviour leads to disastrous consequences. People do not so much look to the state to defend them against corporate power and financial predation - they look to the state to defer the consequences of a sick economy to some future time. Wendell Berry has argued we should not expect someone else, state or corporation, to solve the problem, because the problem begins with the fact that we have already given proxies for almost all of our economic and political practices to them. We have given proxies to corporations to produce all of our food, clothing and shelter, and are rapidly giving proxies to corporations and the state to provide education, health care, child care, and all sorts of services that local communities used to provide. As Berry puts, "Our major economic practice, in short, is to delegate the practice to others." Solutions are not likely to come from governments and corporations. People must heal economic practices by bringing them back down to earth, giving local communities a direct involvement in discerning what is necessary for the health of the community.

This means acknowledging dependence on one another and sharing risk. It means being attentive to local forms of knowledge of people and land. It means re-establishing direct, face-to-face relationships between producers and consumers, as well as encouraging everyone to become producers - gardening, baking bread, making furniture, whatever it might be - to reconnect with the material world and not simply be passive consumers. We need to stop giving our money over to an abstract and destructive financial system, and put it to work locally through credit unions and co-ops that can make realistic and cooperative assessments of debt and risk. Churches are taking leading roles in fostering these kinds of grounded economies, supporting the kinds of local development projects, Fair Trade arrangements, credit unions, community supported agriculture projects, and other projects I discuss in my book Being Consumed. Economy is not a separate sphere of life that only intersects with the religious sphere when people act immorally with their money or are unable to meet their needs. The idea that theology and economics are two separate pursuits is a thoroughly modern idea, the product of the last 250 years or so, an idea that Christians traditionally would have found bizarre. If we can again see how doctrines of creation and incarnation are inseparable from our economic practices, Christians can help to heal the material world. William Cavanaugh is Research Professor at the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University, Chicago. He is the author of Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Eerdmans, 2008) and The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2010). His most recent book is Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Eerdmans, 2011).
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/04/15/3192406.htm