In response to critics of what I have to say about economics – For what it’s worth, I didn’t mean when I wrote the book (and I still don’t mean now) to make Chapter 1 a careful critique of market economies. Anything I have to say concretely on that subject comes in the second half of the book, as well as in the last chapter on hope where I begin to mark my transition toward the second half. All I meant (and mean) to draw out in Chapter 1 is a certain connection Paul makes between idolatry and a certain (sort of) “economizing” gesture. I understand by “economizing” here just this: inserting something into a system of circulation that pretends to some kind of closure. I in no way mean to close the door on trade.

In a word, keep reading. :)

Rosalynde – Yours is a particularly good question. Paul seems to indicate a certain causal relationship, but it’s complex. He says at least this: that involvement in the economic order of idolatry directly leads to God’s giving idolaters up to their law-driven lust. There’s some sort of causality there, but it’s not between the two elements you isolate; rather, it’s between one of them and God’s action in connection with the other. I suppose my thinking was (and is) that because God’s caused response to the one (the economic order of idolatry) takes the shape of his giving people over to the other (the collusion of lust and law), there’s reason to think that there’s a deep connection between the two—that the collusion of lust and law is somehow at the bottom of the economic order of idolatry. From there, it’s not hard to drum up some motivating points of connection (so much of idolatry is bound up with lust, for instance!).

I hope that helps to clarify things.

There are a few other comments I’ll make later this week in a separate blog post.

The general approach is very similar to Nibley’s old Mantic/Sophist distinction. However I think there’s a danger that it falls prey to the same failings of Nibley. It’s fine to focus on production in this originary sense. (Here grace broadly speaking) However I’m not at all convinced it’s bad to then have economics (in the general sense of tradeoffs and trade) with the produced without always focusing in on the originary. It reminds me of the discussion within Heideggarian studies of authentic vs. inauthentic modes of being and emphasizing this isn’t an ethical relationship. I think the same applies here. Certainly we can focus on the grace however doing economics is not necessarily repressing God’s grace. Indeed the logic Joseph (and you Adam in your own writings) demands that exercising economics is itself a manifestation of God’s grace. But if that’s true then the critique against economics seems to fall apart unless there’s more to it.

God gives still others. Markets meet, greet me: carpenters, milliners, bakers, engineers, lawyers, economists, philosophers. All love berries. I love their love—not piles of rotting berries. I’m good at berries. I have too many berries. I trade for bread, clothing, house, car, education, contracts, books. I live comfortably and long. I become like God, a giver of good gifts. Others love berries.

I read economics. I understand producer and consumer surplus. Every purchase, every sale is a gift. Both buyer and seller receive more than they give. Both are godlike in their service, both enhance the life of the other. God’s relationship with me—I always get more than I give—is manifest in my relationship with others as we voluntarily trust and trade. God is with us, in us, as we mutually serve and mutually benefit. Gifts, surplus, given both to the greatest and to the least of these, my neighbors, are given unto God.

Like Joseph, speculators wisely stockpile in the fat years and sell in the lean, sometimes saving lives, always, when successful, smoothing prices and raising the use value of what they saved, always, when unsuccessful being themselves the main victim of their error.

Specialization, productivity increase. Real prices fall for all. Markets globalize. Millions who pickeddugcaughtdied in China, India, Africa now give and receive surplus, live longer and prosper. Liberty and voluntary exchange do God’s work, are God’s gift, make us more like God.

But sin creeps in. Abstraction is sin. Abstraction hides what is given, gifts given to all who will receive them–the givenness of surplus, full bellies, comfortable houses, education, medicine, enriching leisure. Abstraction puts God at a distance. God is Gini Coeeficient = 0, is Utopia, is nowhere. It is God’s very nature—his existence in my well-fed neighbor, the well sheltered African child–that human Abstraction, that philosophical Abstrators suppress in their unrighteousness, obscuring his grace and his nearness by regarding him only as a distant and utopian, abstract, disembodied, fleshless, bloodless deity.

Russell #1, I’ll be very curious to hear more from you (I still owe you a better response to your very interesting comments in response to Joe’s book a coupla weeks ago). My own sense/guess is that the critique you are hinting at, that I think applies to both Joe and Adam, is that they are keeping discussion of politics and economics at a fairly abstract level, without engaging the nitty gritty details of particular institutions and/or practices. I think this has the virtue of making their writing less politically polarizing but I think this also makes it a bit more difficult to offer the kind of concrete critique that I suspect you are kind of looking or hoping for. Perhaps you are thinking in a different vein, but my own hunch is that Joe (and Adam’s comments here, and elsewhere) are plowing a path that will make it easier — but also, if not more, urgent — to follow-up on with more detailed and more constructive critiques that flesh out the different concrete Zion-building possibilities in our modern context of capitalist organizations and practices. But the first step is to recognize the . . . let’s call it “ideologly” for what it is….

‘Sounds like the murderous psychopath who wants to be caught.

But, really, for some of us the Law is like an irritating flashing neon light that comes on only when we’re not living beyond it.

Thanks for organizing this roundtable blog discussion; I look forward to reading the takes which many smart people have on Joe’s surprising little book. It was only upon re-reading it that I really got a sense of just how radical a footing his initial foray into the subject of “hope” (which is really the subject of orienting ourselves towards something holy, something impossible to conceive in the absence of a full embrace of God’s gifts, in other words: Zion) really was. I like your summary here:

We can “economize God’s glory” as a proprietary commodity. We can license and trademark creation. We can speculate and stockpile. We can create demand.

I don’t how intentionally you chose those words for the sake of tweaking the noses of the capitalists among T&S’s many readers, but my guess is that you selected them very intentionally. Especially that last one: “creating demand.” Nothing is more central to the unstated worldview of specialization and finance–which is, of course, a step beyond that of the simple marketplace, where existing demands elicit productive responses, in a manner not wholly unlike our coming to the Lord with our needs and He supplying them in response–than the “creation” of demand. You want food? You can grow food, you can hunt for food, you can prepare food. Ah, but what if I could tell you that I can, with the proper application of investment and labor, present you–for a price!–with better food, faster food, rarer food? You don’t really need it, but now that you know about it–now that you know that there is, in fact, a way to escape the gift-and-response, plant-and-harvest, request-and-provide context of the mundane, and instead to maximize and streamline in such a way to produce more and more elite and more diverse stuff than ever before–you really do kind of want it, don’t you? It becomes a need. I’ve got a three hour commute every day; how can I live without my Starbucks?! And so Joe lays the basic foundations of what will turn out to be a pretty profound attack upon the assumption which we all fall into, the assumption that the present world of capital accumulation and speculation and competition is our default mode, and that looking for consecration is something separate from the work we have to do here and now. (It’s an pervasive enough assumption that I don’t think Joe himself entirely escapes it in the end…though perhaps that’s just a misunderstanding of his argument on my part. I’ll be reading, hopefully to learn.)