Abstract
I am deeply grateful to the respondents for these insightful and challenging analyses. Numerous themes and issues have been highlighted, helping me to see more of the scope and impact of Divine Currency and, crucially, revealing what was lacking and what remains to be addressed. While I wish I could proceed point-by-point and respond to the rich and generative questions and critiques raised in each piece, space precludes this. I will instead attempt to address some of the common themes that emerge among the respondents.
One concern that appears consistently among some of the respondents as well as in other reviews is the matter of political response and praxis. Whether due to my use of Foucault, whose work has been critiqued for potentially undermining political action, or because of my indictment of the internal logics of divine economy within Christian thought, a question emerges about whether resistance is possible and what forms it might take (Kwok; Grau). In part this concern arises from how I have framed my work, as distinct from and critical of constructive theology. The latter is a broad and diverse field, of course, and my sights were set, in particular, on approaches or postures that present theological intervention as unproblematically oppositional, as if theological discourse inhabited a pure space to render judgment and offer a clear and untroubled alternative vision to rescue us from current predicaments.
In this sense, I added my voice to the growing set of studies calling out the failures of Christian theology and theology’s implications in structures of domination. While such concerns are not new, they have been marginal within the field of theology itself, coming instead from “outsiders,” whether self-styled pundits of atheism, ostensibly objective social scientific analyses of Christian belief within religious studies, or other vantage points with no apparent stake in theological discourse or Christian communities of praxis. What seems new to me is the upsurge in critical approaches that identify themselves as theological in some sense, that want to lay claim to, take seriously, extend, deconstruct, but not fully jettison the two-millennia long conversation within Christianity, and at the same time hold Christian theology to account, often brutally so. Yet, unlike many earlier internal critiques of dominant theology, such as liberationist approaches, these newer interventions are not making recourse to some other authoritative theological voice, such as the poor and oppressed as biblically framed, but are instead reckoning with theology’s internal failures writ large. My study occupies this space partially, as a form of internal critique, while also trying to hold a conversation with “outsiders” invested in social scientific and social theoretical assessments of Christian thought within genealogies of the West.
So my jibe at one common approach to constructive theology raises the question of what critical response might look like theologically. But it also raises the broader question of politics even for those with no theological investment, for it points to the larger conceptual challenge of where the fulcrum point or site of leverage for resistance resides if all sites are implicated in the structures of violence and exploitation that permeate our existence. There are numerous potential responses across a spectrum here, from resignation and withdrawal, to pressing forward in embrace of contradictions, to renewed optimism and more strident proclamations of difference, whether through coercive reassertions of orthodoxy or hopefully subversive retrievals of marginal voices. I tend to align myself with the second option, finding intellectually and affectively appealing the approaches that enjoin action for transformation while admitting and even foregrounding the brokenness of the methods and tools employed. While there are works addressing what such praxis amidst complicity looks like (and Grau and Kwok gesture toward these), additional contributions are necessary to establish a more developed conceptual toolkit that makes the grounds for constructive, forward movement compelling and persuasive. While I think constructive theology has lost its steam, perhaps a proliferation of contributions along these lines would help renew a vision for engagement and regenerate momentum.
Another major point of interest and concern surrounds the uses, abuses, power, and limits of metaphor both at the conceptual-linguistic level and in terms of praxis (Anidjar, Grau). Anidjar presses past the limits of metaphor, in a manner similar to my move from analogy to homology, yet in a way that appears to me to venture into ontology. The Christological-financial union is constitutive of history via incarnation at a level to which I am reticent to go, preferring as I do to remain in a linguistic frame with its conceptual and discursive implications. Anidjar might resist the characterization as ontological and one might describe his intervention differently. We are certainly aligned, however, in regarding the history of financialization as the history of Christianity. Of course, this needs to be nuanced to acknowledge the contributions to financialization from ancient Near Eastern, Greek, Vedic, Chinese, and Islamic thought as well, as rightly intimated by his question of “which monotheisms.” Kwok’s eloquent intervention highlighting Confucian and Buddhist perspectives on economy provides this important nuance as well and reveals the relevance of decolonial vantage points in assessing any historical moment and not simply the modern.
Grau reminds us, rightly, that the mixed and multiple (economic) metaphors in Christian tradition make it difficult to assert any single frame as governing. This relates to her concern that the Eusebian tale not be the master narrative. My intent was certainly not to foreclose on other readings but to highlight Eusebius’s vision as a significant part of the master narrative precisely because of his (apparent) proximity to political power. This includes the perceptible influence of his Constantinian portrait on subsequent political theology and templates for imperial governance in Christendom—and arguably into early modernity. I also stress the instability and multiplicity of metaphor, which is why I tried to avoid making my study depend upon metaphor and instead to situate metaphor within broader conceptual systems and their institutionalizations.
I certainly remain open to creative retrievals and alternative metaphors that challenge the dominant ones, as Grau’s own work exploring the trickster image has admirable done. I wished to move the needle toward considering how to present such potentially subversive images as part and parcel of the master discourse they inhabit, rather than as distinct and outside of the trappings of power and violence. The “speaking with a forked tongue” that Bhabha famously highlighted in postcolonial mimicry means the discourse can always cut both ways. And as Trump has dramatically shown, sometimes the trickster can occupy the highest office in the land and use coercive power for abusive whims. Part of his own appeal and claim to power, regardless of its truthfulness, is as a marginal figure, one from outside the halls of traditional political prestige. Even subversive symbols like the trickster may become tyrannical, making Grau’s (2021, 96) final caveat critical: “I submit that it is impossible to read from biblical texts or theological symbols an ideal, equitable economy, but what we have inherited in this symbol system is God and Mammon, so to speak, as constantly competing powers, though structured, possibly, in similar ways, and often difficult to separate.” With this I wholeheartedly agree.
In noting the ways I problematize the operations of debt in the ransom narratives, Grau asks (96) whether I “also reject any sense of forgiveness of debt, including possible reparations for slavery, always already caught up in (White) sovereignty or supremacy.” I do trouble debt forgiveness, at least how it is often conceived and presented, for the ways it suppresses and masks sovereignty. To forgive debt is to play its game and invigorate the authority of the one who cancels. That said, the pragmatist in me is not ready to reject various interventions toward debt forgiveness or debt negation as provisional and necessary measures to extend space for life amidst the crushing grip of financial obligations. Current proposals for president-elect Biden to issue an executive order to forgive student debt draw on a very ancient and troubling tradition of unilateral sovereign decree in terms of debt cancellation. Yet the move is one I would welcome, the entrenchment of sovereignty notwithstanding.
Grau sets forth reparations as a form of debt forgiveness. Yet, debt forgiveness appears to me as the opposite logic of reparations, which are a call for debt repayment. In fact, it would be the worst abuse of debt forgiveness language for the pundits and institutions of white supremacy to invoke debt forgiveness as a “pass” on the debt owed to Black folk. The debt owed to the descendants of slaves, whose unpaid labor helped create the surplus that fuels capitalism, is a debt that I unequivocally believe should not be forgiven and must be repaid. Such repayment would provide a poetic finality to capitalism: at once fulfilling a basic capitalist dictum that labor must be paid, making good on the wage relation, and at the same time liquidating the surplus capital extracted via primitive accumulation and thus evaporating much of the reserve that drives capitalism’s engine.
That we are a long way from such just redistribution is seen in Runions’s powerful examination of “sacrificonomics” as evidenced in the prison industrial complex. Few sites so clearly reveal the merger of sacrificial and debt logics. These have overlapped for millennia in human civilization but the Christian twist of making such elision redemptive has added its distinct and perverse fuel to the fire of the human propensity toward reciprocal cruelty and punishment. Runion’s intervention is a welcome and essential assessment of the ways this logic is presently operative and even constitutive of our society. Her study brilliantly shows how prison ministries focusing on the redemptive work of Christ in relation to the punishment borne by the prisoner are a microcosm of the larger role played by the mass incarcerated as redeeming scapegoats for society, providing a source of exploited labor to generate surpluses, under the guise of repaying their own debts to society.
What appears crucial now is reconceiving what constructive interventions look like. We stand in the wake of the necessary process of deconstruction of inherited Eurocentric and white supremacist categories of thought. We are witnessing decolonial ruptures of the canon that rightly reject attempts simply to diversify and “add color” to the curriculum. Symbols of empire are slowly but surely falling. Amidst the righteous fire that burns away long regnant injustice, can we even talk about rebuilding? If so, how, and what might it look like? My intuition is that it must move beyond discourse. Critical theory and constructive theology might contribute to visions for institution building; small scale, communal reformations; reestablishing a commons; and re-creating something like civil society (a problematic term whose replacement has yet to be elevated). Instead of another sarcastic Tweet or indignant op-ed denunciation (both of which I am also guilty) as the extent of what public engagement looks like, the task may involve the hard work of envisioning and describing in practical, accessible detail—and then putting into practice—moves forward amidst the rubble, modeling how to build something new with tools and remains that inevitably contain traces or spores of the blight we sought to burn away.
