Scot McKnight recently linked a piece by Walter Brueggemann's called A Biblical Approach to the Economic Crisis. I've read and generally liked several things Brueggemann has written, which is part of why I find articles like this so irksome. Here is what I wrote on the Jesus Creed blog.
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Thanks for the link to the article by Burggemann. It is yet another example of what makes me want to pull my hair out when theologians start talking economics. 🙂
There are two basic questions every society has to wrestle with: "How many of which things shall we produce today?" and "On what basis shall things be distributed?" Theologians almost invariably dwell on the second question to the exclusion of the first. The mindset is that material goods simply exist. The only obstacle to abundance is greed and lack of generosity. If we were just more giving, then inequities would just melt away.
But material goods do not simply exist. Economic labor is about transforming matter, energy, and data from less useful states into more useful states. On any given day a society has X number of people, with X amount of productive capacity, and X amount resources. Which things shall we produce today? While a small community (i.e., family, small commune) may be able to know each other's needs well enough to come to some communal decision about what to produce how to distribute, you cannot do this when the community grows to more than a few dozen. How to coordinate the productive capacities millions of people who are complete strangers? Markets.
Markets create instantaneous feedback loops about what is wanted and what should be supplied. Markets are far from perfect. They process people's bad choices just as well as people's good choices. Alone, they will not lead to an entirely just production and distribution. The must be constrained by effect juridical systems and supplemented with a populous that values generosity. But they are absolutely essential to creating abundance the theologians like Bruggemann want us to share with each other.
Bruggeman is right that viewing the individual as the basic economic element is wrong. He does not precisely articulate what the basic element should be, but based on his "common good" motif it appears that national government might be his preferred economic element. But the only alternatives are not individual versus national control. The Torah has families living in community with other families as the basic element. The jubilee prohibits the permanent alienation of families from their allotted land. Land is privately held in trust for God to provide for the family and to be used in making available goods for trade and sharing. Levels of societal administration beyond these local communities exist largely in service to these communities. They are not the focal point of societal functioning or economics.
Autonomous individualism is a product of the Enlightenment. But so is the notion that a national government entity can correctly comprehend massive complexity, act with greater wisdom toward the common good than what emerges from people freely engaging one another, and that it can do so with greater moral rectitude than would otherwise be the case.
Bruggeman's economic vision is too small. Generosity? Yes. But we were created to be co-creators with God. There is scarcity. We are finite beings with finite time, capabilities, and resources on any given day. We participate in the generation of our individual and communal abundance. When we celebrate communion we don't take of the grain and grape but rather of the bread and the wine. Human labor is integral. But because theologians like Bruggeman see only existing goods to be justly distributed, the productive aspect of dominion … transforming matter, energy, and data from less useful states to more useful states … is lost. The basic question is not generosity but how rather how do we create a mutually advantageous cooperative venture that both justly produces and distributes abundance. Generosity and markets are essential to such a venture.
What we need from theologians is a carefully thought out understanding of how to engage basic economic questions in creating the cooperative venture. We need to rediscover the high calling of work in the marketplace and understand it in other than purely instrumental terms. Instead, we get moralist platitudes like, "Whereas autonomous economics begins with a premise of scarcity, biblical faith is grounded in the generosity of God who wills and provides abundance." We deserve far better from our best theological minds.
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