the Economy of Grace

This book by Kathryn Tanner is a veritable nuclear submarine of well-argued scholarship. I won't say much about it, partly because the content of the book is more the fruitful-and-thorough cross-pollination of ideas I've already read other books about and so can easily just dump loads of relevant links (see final paragraph) into this post, partly because I'm rushing so as to join my brother for a game of giant backyard chess (yes I'm still on holiday), and partly because if this post piques your interest even in the slightest I think you should just read this book.

   Tanner seeks to explore 'theological economy' - how religious truth might yield any implications for systems of material resource distribution. She argues that such a link is undeniable if we look at Christian theology with any degree of serious application, especially when regarding worldly structures such as capitalism which literally thrive on collective selfishness - the opposite of the rightly-aligned heart-motives called to by Christianity - in competition that inevitably leaves winners and losers, and more often than not the former feel exempt from any responsibility to extensively care for the latter. She goes on to explore philosophical and theological conceptions of property, of ownership, of gift-giving, of interdependence; and chiefly asks where grace, the central component of Christian ethical reality, fits into our understanding of economic systems - she concludes the grace sits at considerable odds to the atomised individualistic competitiveness that characterises capitalism. An 'economy of grace' is not one of everyone-for-themselves-competition nor one of purely-reciprocal gift-giving - it is one of plenty and prosperity, because people understanding the nature (in a Christian worldview) of their existence as an individual human among the wider human society/community have a radically different attitude to other beings, to resources, to their own time, to their own needs and wants and those of others; one that completely upturns basic presumptions about how markets work, how welfare works, and more. Toward the end of the book she tentatively explores some structural changes that could take place to bring us toward this model of economy, alongside a hefty prayerful caveat about how lost and broken the world is and the need for such economic change to be known to be unsustainable unless supported by genuine heart change.

   It is an extremely interesting and thought-provoking book, and I would challenge any Christian who takes social justice seriously and has an interest in critical understanding of our global economic system so as to work for what is good and right to read it.

   I promised a final paragraph full of link-dumpage, so here you are: for excellent explorations of how non-competitiveness in global systems can complement and accelerate many aspects of social, political, economic, and environmental justice, from a non-theological approach, check out Tim Jackson and several scholars from the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. For a general further reading on Christian views on social justice, check out Tim Keller - but for a much more in-depth nuanced reading on grace, God's love, and the nature of rightly-oriented human preference in ethical decision-making, check out Robert Adams. Finally, if you're up for something quite dense but incredibly encouraging, challenging, and enlightening on the topic of 'love' as something that God does and that we should do, I cannot recommend better than Søren Kierkegaard (obviously ties directly into Kathryn Tanner's discussions of grace).