Abstract
In this remarkable work Sean Doherty sets out theologically to clarify some of the basic methodological assumptions that govern most modern discussions of economic ethics, both secular and Christian. He does so by way of a comparison of the theological method of Martin Luther and that of the contemporary Swiss theologian and social ethicist Arthur Rich (1910–1992). Rich has been widely influential in the German-speaking world for his defence of its distinctive form of ‘capitalism with fewer tears’. He is thus one of the most influential proponents of European ‘managerial capitalism’, a type of equality-focused capitalism that Philip Bobbitt has suggested is currently in a contest to define the global economic architecture against two rivals, ‘entrepreneurial capitalism’ emphasising innovation (US, UK) and ‘mercantile capitalism’ that aims primarily to dominate regional trade (Japan). Hence a close analysis of his avowedly theological position, born from studies with Emil Brunner in the early years of the Second World War, is especially fertile for Christians engaging in discussions of economic ethics today.
The first of the book’s three chapters dives deep into Luther’s Sermon von dem Wucher, and the second into Rich’s Wirtschaftsethik (translated in 2006 as Business and Economic Ethics: The Ethics of Economic Systems). Each chapter excavates in fine-grained detail the theological presuppositions and intermediate conceptual moves each thinker deploys when describing ethical behaviour in the economic realm. This summary material is biographically and historically situated to yield penetrating portraits of the two thinkers and the host of background and framing assumptions they bring to parse their contexts and generate normative proposals.
The book’s third chapter is appropriately entitled, ‘An analysis of Arthur Rich’s method in the light of that of Martin Luther’, and uses Luther as a sort of divining rod to expose the core assumptions of Rich’s economic theory. While not claiming that Luther had everything right, Doherty displays how deeply theological his thought always is, and does so in a manner that can help us become more self-aware about the points at which our own thinking has become sub-theological.
Rich is set up as a thoughtful representative of contemporary social ethics with its overriding concern to be in detailed dialogue with secular thinkers, in this case economists. His methodological assumptions are nicely laid out, with special emphasis on the core metaphors and presumptions that guide his approach to economic questions as well as his understanding of the remit, sources and type of authority of the Christian theologian. At each point along the way Luther’s approach to these same questions is introduced in order to expose unacknowledged assumptions of Rich’s position. At methodologically pivotal points Rich’s case relies on Weber’s ‘principle of optimisation’ and a consensus-politics in which widespread moral values are assumed to have moral weight because they are widely held in democratic polities. The outcome, Doherty shows, is a Reinhold Niebuhr-like consequentialism in which actions are judged only by their outcomes and all human action is therefore taken to be both complex and tragic. Furthermore, Rich’s placement of social-scientific data at the base of his conceptual framework makes it impossible to introduce concepts resting on the authority of Scripture into material discussions of economic questions. All this differs radically from Luther who assumes that some biblical teachings are categorically binding, centrally Jesus’ teachings on wealth in the Sermon on the Mount. To act in obedience to these commands is not a tragic compromise, but can be a genuinely good work even in a broken world. Furthermore, because these are Jesus’ own commands they have the power to expose our constant attempts to evade them. This leads to Doherty’s central conclusion that a higher view of Scripture and a lower view of the mandate for social consensus can, paradoxically, lead to greater attention to material conditions and a more robust social ethic.
The book as a whole can be read as a display of how methodologically self-aware modern theologians have become. Doherty’s work is perhaps best read as the return of a ‘church come of age’ to the problem that Clement faced in his treatise Who is the Rich Man Who is Saved? Does Jesus really mean Christians to give all they have to the poor? How are we to read his teaching that, ‘if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well’ (Matt. 5:40, NIV)? Luther thinks it eats away the fundaments of Christian faith to dilute or diffuse such claims. He therefore presumes them to be literally binding. This has a range of important results. In the first place it broadens the question from one concerned solely with ethics in placing repentance and discipleship as a first order of business. Taking Jesus at his word suggests to Luther that the central problematic of the Christian in the economic realm is not that we do not know how our acts will change outcomes (which is true) but that we are selfish and prone to evade restrictions on our economic behaviour—a desire which Luther calls greed. Against the moral consensus of modern capitalism, Luther insists that what we can learn from Jesus’ teaching is at least that, ‘Greed must be pulverized, not used’, Doherty concludes (p. 169). A signal contribution of this book is its explication of the symmetry between the way we read Scripture and the ways we read economic activity.
Attending to Luther’s framing of the ethical problems raised by these spiritual temptations also enlivens us to how often we assume that mere social-scientific descriptions of economic behaviour can suffice as moral analysis. To illustrate the problem, Doherty singles out Rich’s assumption that contemporary income and property ownership inequalities are morally reprehensible to any open-minded observer of the empirical facts. Doherty points out that there are countervailing and influential voices in economics who argue that wealth differentials stimulate economic growth, making everyone better off. Though Doherty applauds Rich for his capacity to engage, stimulate and learn from social scientists, Rich also struggles to question their basic frameworks of interpretation. This limits the work he can ask theological claims to do, to yield social conservatism. Since every economic system embroils us in compromises, we have no choice but to participate in the system we have while trying to make it a little bit better.
Doherty’s signal contribution is the precision with which he lays out the methodological implications of such presumptions. In familiar culture-Protestant style, Rich understands Scripture to provide the motive for Christian engagement in the quest for ever greater justice. Conversely, for Luther, ‘Scripture does not merely tell one what to do. It needs to define the world in which action takes place’ (p. 181). The problem with the social ethics of Rich (like many practitioners of Christian economic ethics today), ‘is not his emphasis on the findings of social science, but the way he limits the notion of “fact” to mechanistic rather than moral explanations of economic realities and human behaviour’ (p. 181, italics original). Rich’s quest to find an ethic that can command a Rawlsian public consensus (defended on theological grounds) ends up subverting the content of the gospel. Luther’s contrasting picture of good works is wholly focused on the good of the neighbour and so he is able to address ethical exhortations not only to policy-makers but to individual economic agents—a stance that turns out to be much better at generating context-sensitive and constructive proposals about how Christians in every walk of life might act more faithfully.
The difference in the two approaches is nicely encapsulated by their readings of the comment in Acts 4 that the first Christian communities shared a community of possessions. While in his direct discussion of this passage Rich takes such economic behaviour logically to follow from the experience of salvation in Jesus Christ (with which Luther would wholly agree), Rich proposes that the passage should be read today as directing Christians to engage with the structures of society that benefit the less well off. Because this insight and common experience of salvation is not available to all in society, Rich thinks that it would be inappropriate to introduce it as a ground for public policy-making. For this we need a more universal account of justice, which Rich finds in Rawls’s ‘veil of ignorance’. Doherty points out that this obscures the original point: the question of the role of common experience in generating an ethic. What common experience unites secular societies? Because he evades this question Rich ends up conflating common ownership of goods with their equal distribution. In order to be consistent, Rich must either re-narrate the behaviour of the first Christians as an early form of modern wealth distribution or admit that the economics that emerged from their experience of the risen Jesus will not be formative for many people in modern societies and so has no binding force for modern Christians.
The book ends with a list of penetrating and important methodological observations. One that is particularly interesting is the claim that contemporary theologians may have been trapped in their dialogue with modern economic theory into angles of view that neutralise their most powerful theological insights. Luther’s work provokes us to ask whether we have become too obsessed with systems and their optimisation and have lost the capacity to see that systems often change because some agents, like the first Christians, have had experiences of salvation which lead them to break the rules of the economics of their time out of love for the neighbour. Along with most contemporary theologians, Rich tends to assume that we have arrived in the age of capitalism and therefore that it would be immoral for citizens of modern democracies seriously to question this social consensus. Rich thus locks himself into an approach that emphasises the macro-economic, in which everything always seems messy and compromise-laden, making damage-limitation modes of moral reasoning inevitably attractive.
What Doherty learns from Luther is that the economy need not be envisioned as ‘an essentially wicked domain into which Christians must venture in order to improve it’. Instead, ‘we should assume that the economy already belongs to God and that he is present and active within it to secure action within it which conforms to his will’ (p. 200). It is this experience that led the faithful peoples of the Bible to espouse economic behaviours that grate against modern capitalism, such as the jubilee and the prohibition of usury. Economic activity is not grubby or debasing, but an engagement in an aspect not only of God’s good creation but of God’s redemptive care for human life. It is, however, a realm in which self-deception is powerfully operative, and Doherty’s treatment of Luther is rich with turnings that are virtually unexplored in contemporary economic ethics. For instance, if we admit that the economic arena is rife with temptations to self-deception, how might we think about practices such as high-speed trading or debt bundling which seem actively to foster economic obscurantism and self-justification? How might Luther’s observation that Jesus positions the voluntary relinquishment of temporal goods as a forum for the exercising of Christian faith speak to a contemporary climate (at least within ‘entrepreneurial capitalist’ societies) in which taxation is increasingly held out as unjust and in which the politician’s promises to voters inevitably boil down to appeals to the wallet? This is an exceedingly rich book for raising such unasked theological questions about Christians’ conceptions of their witness in the economic realm.
It is also a major contribution to English-speaking scholarship in offering us a Luther wonderfully free from the Lutherans—who have tended to reduce his ethics to an ethics of internal motivation or organised it via a single theme such as justification by faith or the two kingdoms. Doherty draws out a whole range of moves that have been obscured by such readings, especially his highly complex and important intertwining of the doctrines of creation and eschatology. It may be churlish to wish that Doherty had been able to deepen our understanding of Luther by explaining how these doctrines can be seen as the armature of the whole of Luther’s theological ethics. The main reason he could not appears to have been his inexplicable introduction at sensitive points in chapter 3 of the very different quest to ‘balance’ nature and history he finds in O’Donovan. The book is, in any case, gloriously successful in its stated aim to make modern Christian ethicists more methodologically self-aware as they wrestle with God and mammon.