The Kingdom of God and the Economic System: An Economics of Hope

Abstract

I opened an earlier essay on this theme with the claim that “despite noble intentions, a great deal of Christian economic ethics has been lamentably supine and bland.”1 A number of both theologians and Christian economists have recognized that Christianity and the existing global capitalist order are radically incompatible. But this doesn’t seem to have issued much in the way of alternative economic suggestions. In the earlier essay, I argued that this was at least partly because the goal of Christian reflection on economics was taken to be the securing of a realistic consensus within the wider public rather than the radical pursuit of Jesus’s teaching, wherever that might lead.2 Many Christians are more familiar with having a radically counter-cultural ethic when it comes to sex (though even this can hardly be taken for granted any longer), but when it comes to economics, we don’t seem able to sustain this. At the time, I refrained from developing this contention at length because I wanted instead to offer a more constructive theological analysis of money. In this essay, I therefore return to this earlier claim that much of Christian economic ethics is “supine and bland” in order to suggest that the problem with the approaches that I criticized originates at the level of the theology that underlies them, and to set out a possible theological remedy.