Abstract
Few scholars have taken it for themselves to look at the ‘economic’ metaphoricity woven into theological discourse and for a while, it seemed like my own Of Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption stood relatively alone as a constructive theology with a critical approach to economic frames and concepts in ancient theological texts. Devin Singh’s Divine Currency is therefore a welcome addition to this particular theological discourse and the investigations into theological metaphors that signify economic relations and exchanges. My entry into the text, it has to be said, comes from a place of familiarity with much of the subject matter and the majority of texts discussed within the pages of Divine Currency.
Theological language largely functions via metaphors. Those again, can be said to vary in the degree of correspondence to the thing or relationship they refer to. Analogies of theological language with economic metaphoricity therefore are subject to a greater dissimilarity between image and the Divine than similiarity. Thus, the analogia entis, as Aquinas and others have held, is in permanent tension with the via negativa. That is, theological language has similarities and resonances with living bodies and structures, but are never simply identical with social or economic structures. It is, thus, ‘counterfeit money’ in the Derridean sense, a coin or currency that is always already an abstraction, a différance.
Singh’s reading of the coin as the imago dei is powerful, as it throws light on the centrality of slavery in the ancient economies of Europe and, in particular, as part of the economic hierarchies of the Roman empire, where capture, conquest and population exchange were some of the main causes of enslavement. The multiethnicity of the Roman empire was also a result of the enslaved populations (140). The treatment of Eusebius is a necessary and important extension of the ‘economic’ analysis of ancient soteriological metaphors and for that we owe Singh a great debt.
Yet, if I understand Singh correctly, the image of the coin has become locked into this dynamic and hence has lost any liberating or critical potential, but rather now permanently functions as an instrument of Christian imperial logic. Singh argues that God also colonizes in this framework (183–184), and that therefore Christianity is little more than an imperial system of oppression. The work done in Divine Currency on Eusebius is useful and important, but the question is whether Eusebius and other imperial apologists should be given the power of definition for the entirety of subsequent articulations of ‘economic’ theology. Rather, I would suggest, imperial apologists like Eusebius remind us of the constant clear and present danger of the use of imperial logic in theological language for the purposes of authoritarian and oppressive political regimes. Augustine already has a much more complicated relationship to both power and empire, by no means an innocent one, but he is already clear that the imperial church is a corpus permixtum, with mixed motivations and allegiances to the power that is now accessible through association with a newly imperial church.
Certainly one can argue that Eusebius and other apologists of the Roman Christian empire may have seen and portrayed God as an imperial colonizer, as a supreme power. But there is always also the other stream—that of the subversion of the kingdom of God as the kingdom of the oppressed and excluded. The use of a metaphor in an oppressive way may not always foreclose its use in liberative ways. This has been argued in terms of the use of ‘Lord’ as an appellation for the Divine in Black Churches, namely as a counterimage to the white slave master, rather than being a simple expression of patriarchy. That is, metaphors function differently in different contexts, depending on the community and the users.
The main contribution of Divine Currency for me is the important work done on Eusebius and Constantine and how theological expression fared under their particular framing. It is an excellent close reading how the counter-imperial notion of the liberating ransom is made identical with imperial sovereignty, a mark of obligation where empire neutralizes the critical potential of the metaphor of ransom. Thus, Singh shows how imperial logic threatens to coopt the critical potential of ransom theories. The image of the divine as mapped onto exploitative economic power was always present in sacred writ. Many parables are mapped onto exploitative economic relations. For example, the ‘economists’ or stewards in parables are local representatives of an absentee landlord. We encounter the relationships between masters and slaves as being likened to those of the kingdom of God, and so forth. Theological language has a notoriously unruly relationship to economic metaphors and has a long history of being interpreted to argue submission and exploitation as well as promote ideas of liberation and economic justice. In Divine Currency, it seems that the economic metaphor of the coin is so distorted by imperial interpretations that any possibility for reconstruction—or a differential reading—of the metaphor is no longer (after Eusebius?) possible.
But what if theological language is less stable, but rather more an unstable ‘trickster’ language: depending on the way the metaphor is employed, it can be oppressive or liberative. But often, theological language remains indeterminate. Each interpreter repeats or reframes the metaphors, often subtly shifting associations and meanings. Such hermeneutical indeterminacy can be said to be contained in the metaphor basileia tou theou, the kingdom of God. While it has been read as subversive to the powers that be, the metaphor can easily be employed to subvert religion for the purposes of political power.
Other questions concern Singh’s use of terminology: What is Singh’s definition of currency, or money? In Divine Currency, the term seems focused exclusively on the concept of the coin, which, in antiquity, was a way to express a combination of economic and political power by powerful actors. Whether currency should be reduced to coins seems less clear. That is certainly what mainstream Western economy became, where a secularized ‘God the Economist’ was reframed as the ‘invisible hand’ of the capitalist market. Further I wonder whether in considering ransom a divine conquest, does Singh reject any sense of forgiveness of debt, including possible reparations for slavery, always already caught up in (White) sovereignty or supremacy?
Yet, one may wonder whether theological metaphors employing economic images can be reduced to capitalist references? What if metaphors are not precise tools but allusive and able to carry multiple meanings? What, for example, are we to make of the fact that contemporary capitalism is increasingly removed from tangible coins, and being moved into the realm of ‘bitcoins’ of virtual currencies that have their own controlling systems? What might this mean for the metaphor of divine currency, or the divine coin that there are fewer and fewer physical coins?
Paul uses the term oikonomia theou referring, it seems, to God’s householding, which extends to the entire created cosmos, rather than only to the economic or political powers of the world. Elsewhere in the gospels, the astonishing claim that one cannot serve God and Mammon remains part of the complex use of economic imaginary in the biblical and Christian tradition, which do not easily add up to either a capitalist or a socialist economic vision, and continue to fluctuate, refusing a simple location in terms of economic narrativity. Another set of questions refers more to theological hermeneutics: Is Singh essentially saying that any metaphor legitimizes the practice it describes? Does this then not imply a literalist approach to theological language? If that is the case, it can be tricky to see how Divine Currency is a re/constructive theological project (9–11) that wants to reserve the possibility of reconstructing a problematic theological metaphor towards a liberative rereading, as is the claim of constructive theologians. Is a reconstruction possible in terms of Singh’s treatment of his subject and what would it look like, if the metaphor appears locked down? This begs the question how the term constructive theology is understood in Singh’s project. If there is no longer a possibility of reading the metaphor in a critically liberative mode, what might constructive theology mean here? If there is no possibility for a liberative or transformative reading, what does constructive mean? My own reading of the use of economic metaphors suggests that ancient (and other) users of these metaphors applied and blended them freely. Images appear in loosely connected association rather than elaborate narratives. Gregory of Nyssa’s elaboration of Christ as ransom to trick the devil out of the slaves captured in the devil’s debtor prison is thus an exception rather than the rule.
One of the questions Divine Currency’s argument raises then is whether any metaphor can liberate and lead to transformative change in society. What are the limitations and functions of metaphorical language? While Elisabeth Johnson insists, correctly, that the “symbol of God functions,” I would submit that how theological symbols or metaphors function is neither linear nor simple. They remain permanently unstable. Though some have tried, 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. Most recently, this deceptive similarity is employed by various political actors in the USA and elsewhere, in order to consolidate authoritarian political and economic powers. Because they use these echoes between economic and theological language to disenfranchise, are theologians unable to use them to counteract these narratives?
