Abstract
This substantial volume on Christianity and Economics is a welcome addition to the Oxford Handbooks series. The editor, Paul Oslington, holds a unique joint appointment in the Schools of Business and Theology at Australian Catholic University. As he notes in the introduction, there has recently been a renewed interest in the relationship between economics and religion. He believes that among theologians ‘the depth of their theological engagement with economics has been increased by interactions with economists in recent years’ (p. xiii). One would like to know whether he thinks the depth of economists’ theological engagement has similarly improved. Of the 42 contributors to the volume, about 30 are economists. In my view that amounts to an imbalance; the volume would have benefited from more contributions by well-informed theologians.
The handbook is divided into five parts. Oslington thinks ‘History is the best place to start’ (p. xiv), so Part I is devoted to a study of the historical relationships between economics and Christian theology. Much useful insight is on parade here, the pick of these chapters being Norwegian scholar Odd Langholm’s magisterial survey of Scholastic economics. There is still much to be learnt from the likes of Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus and Peter Olivi on topics such as usury, the just price and the just wage; I am struck by how little awareness today’s fair trade movement has of its forerunner in the concept of the just price. Four chapters are devoted to the interrelationship between theology and the growing discipline of economics in Western Europe from the eighteenth century onwards. These include contributions by scholars from France, Italy, Portugal and Canada. Here I think the material could have benefited from a tighter editorial hand, both to improve the overall quality of English and to avoid overlap.
There is also much historical substance in Part II, but here theological economics is addressed from the vantage point of different churches and denominations. Andrew Yuengert offers a shrewd assessment of Catholic Social Teaching: ‘CST does not consider itself to be a competitor to economics. What it supplies to economics (and to other social science) is a normative view of the person. The vision is theological, but it is oriented to action’ (p. 157). Yuengert thinks the tone of CST is often admirably measured, but ‘the popes regularly lapse into analysis that is overly optimistic about the power of its vision to transform world politics, and which overstates the ease with which its reforms can be carried out’ (p. 168). We need a theology of the second-best or a theologically informed scale on which we can distinguish ‘pretty good’ from ‘not as good’ (p. 169)—wise words indeed.
Some of these chapters are informative about particular thinkers—mainly economists—but fail to indicate what if anything is distinctive about the particular church’s approach; I felt this was true of the chapter on Anglicanism. In contrast, the chapters on less mainstream churches, notably Anabaptist and Pentecostal approaches to economics, are full of interest. Shane Clifton’s insight into the way Pentecostalism is currently transforming the developing world through its encouragement of small-scale entrepreneurial activity is especially welcome. Pentecostalism breeds positivity, which ‘is not so much a denial of the reality of poverty as it is a refusal to capitulate to it’ (p. 271). There is an implied criticism here of liberation theology, which has tended to encourage a victim mentality. Clifton cites Donald Miller: ‘while Liberation Theology opted for the poor, the poor opted for Pentecostalism’ (ibid.). Although the rise of Pentecostalism is marred by its association with the prosperity gospel, the fact is that prosperity preaching tends to be more a problem with the pastors who preach it than the entrepreneurs who get on with the job of bringing people—not just themselves—out of poverty. Interestingly, the chapter in Part III on ‘Christianity and the Prospects for Development in the Global South’ by Peter Heslam comes to very similar conclusions.
Part II also includes a sympathetic account by Edd Noell of Reconstructionism, the Reformed approach which of all Christian approaches seeks to apply the economic provisions of the Mosaic Law to contemporary society most literally. It takes the theonomist view that laws not specifically abrogated by New Testament teaching remain in place, and God requires obedience to these laws among the nations in general. Although Reconstructionism takes a radical stance on, for example, fractional banking, criticising levels of bank lending that surpass the level of deposits to a bank, it does not require the application of the Jubilee law because the Jubilee is thought to have been fulfilled in Jesus—a curious judgement. I felt Noell could have drawn more on the work of Christopher Wright, who advocates a paradigmatic approach, seeking to identify the principle at the heart of any Old Testament Law but then applying it in a fresh and imaginative (not wooden) way to our current context.
A serious omission in this section is the failure to make any mention of the Quakers. The Quakers had a huge impact on the development of British business, out of all proportion to their numbers. They were prominent among the many examples of nineteenth-century Nonconformist Christian entrepreneurs who developed a highly distinctive approach to business ethics, highlighted by care for their employees.
In Part III, which addresses ‘Christianity, Capitalism and Development’, the outstanding chapter, apart from Heslam’s contribution, is by Max Stackhouse on ‘Weber, Theology and Economics’. This is a judicious survey of the Weber thesis about the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism and the subsequent debate, though he also discusses Weber’s work on other religions. Stackhouse’s conclusion, which I share, is that Weber may have been wrong in some of his detailed analysis but he was definitely on to something—he was asking the right questions and was alert to the fact that religious thinking could have significant impact on economic behaviour even though these effects might be indirect and unintended.
I was disappointed by Part IV, ‘Economic Analysis of Religion’, being unpersuaded that the economists’ analyses of, for example, religious labour markets or ‘switching’ between denominations add much to our understanding—least of all when they resort to statistical and algebraic models. It is interesting—but not surprising—to learn that both Adam Smith and David Hume thought that clergy of a state-supported church were more likely to be lazier in performance of their duties than clergy who were paid variable amounts by their own congregations.
Fortunately the handbook ends on a strong note. Part V, ‘Interdisciplinary Exchanges’, comprises thoughtful pieces on the key topics of economic justice, happiness, usury, gender, poverty, and, together, human nature, identity and motivation. What characterises nearly all of these chapters is the attempt to bring a balanced, full-orbed biblical perspective to the subject. Albino Berrera offers a compelling view of the interrelationship between justice and love, suggesting that a world operating on justice alone (defined minimally as giving people their due) ‘is an unhappy, impoverished and terrifying place to live’ but that justice finds its completion and perfection in love—though this is a point at which the book might usefully have benefited from a firmer grounding in the wider subject of Christian ethics. Harper and Smirl’s study of usury makes interesting comparisons between Christianity and Islam, concluding that though Islamic banking is pre-mised on a sharing of loss between venture and financiers, research indicates that most financial instruments used by Islam are more debt-like in nature than one might expect. The chapter on gender is notable for the fact that it is the only one written by a woman, Carrie Miles (such sparse representation is surely unfortunate), as well as the fact that it succeeds in being both challengingly radical and whole-heartedly biblical.
In conclusion, I recommend readers with an interest in economic issues to get hold of this book, but not to read it as I have read it. The task of reviewing a book inevitably means having to read it from cover to cover, which felt like hard going at times. This is a book that is best dipped into, sampled and read a bit at a time. Some readers will be captivated by parts that left me cold. I certainly found nuggets I treasure and to which I will want to return.