Marrying economics and theology

(Last of three parts)

For the sake of being different, let me begin the conclusion of this series by revisiting the introductory notion of D. Stephen Long in his Divine Economy book. “As a discipline, economics has increasingly developed an anti-humanistic mode. Political economists first freed economics from theology at the end of the eighteenth century with Adam Smith’s revolution. Economists then freed economics from political theory in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century economics has become an increasingly abstract—mathematical—science.”

Not only modern economics has displaced theology its relevance in economic policy-making (while economics also arbitrarily assumes the determination of individual welfare in nearly complete utilitarian means) it is a discipline that is also most willing to abdicate the philosophy of just economics for correct economics. In a strongly-worded foreword in Beyond Capitalism and Socialism: A New Statement of an Old ideal, Kirkpatrick Sale asserts: “Yes, indeed, economists have made chaos, and they have done it on a worldwide if not universal scale, and for some reason are richly rewarded for it. They have created a system, in both capitalist and socialist guises, that favors the using up of the world’s resources at ever-faster rates, that encourages their processing in ways that produce pollution and waste, that puts wealth into ever-fewer hands in the countries of the favored few, that allows for great sickness, poverty, ignorance, and starvation across the world, and that celebrates all of the Seven Deadly Sins including sloth.”

Furthermore, Christian theology, common sense and the collected wisdom of sages from the beginning of civilization tell us that economies were built around the person for the simple reason that his existence transcends beyond just a mere beneficiary of or a participant to the activities of resource building and consumption.

But while it is also important for economics to seek its own prescription from a strict rubric of rationality and economic value, the theological prescription attempts to proffer a deeper and more meaningful impact to the individual person -- one that places importance of ethical values, upholding the virtues of fair consumption and distribution while keeping its being agnostic to an economic system.

The seeming dichotomy and strength of their prescriptions may justify their need to be isolated from one another, however, they must come to the realization that both are in perfect correspondence for the simple fact that they are not only concerned with human actions they are also both interested to seek ways for humans to coordinate those actions to benefit from the economic system.

This is not to say that theology must or should force its examples and precepts in the study of economics, it only wants to re-establish the ideals both shared in their history which has been lost since the secularization of economics. In the words of John Maynard Keynes in his introduction to his Essays in Persuasion: . . . the Western World . . . is capable of reducing the economic problem, which now absorbs our moral and material energies, to a position of secondary importance . . . The day is not far off when the Economic Problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and . . . the arena of the heart and head will he occupied, or re-occupied, by our real problems -- the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.

Alfred Marshall spoke in the same wise in his Principles of Economics that “Man’s character has been molded by his every-day work, and the material resources which he thereby procures, more than by any other influence unless it be that of his religious ideals; and the two great forming agencies of the world’s history have been the religious and the economic.” Thus economics cannot keep a univocal meaning of itself as an impersonal and mathematical discipline nor can it remain impervious to its original design and vocation. Economics must and should confront the fact that it cannot solve the world’s disparity and material insufficiency by merely advancing the benefits of industrialization and economic value. The industrial life cycle must be replaced by life cycle. 

Economics therefore must transcend from the idea or from the dynamics of resource distribution; of supply and demand; of bears and bulls crunching. Economics is about the person at the center of it all and that he is not just a part of the resource. As the Catholic Church would like to aptly put it “The Church's social and economic doctrine is a correct view of the human person and of his unique value.”

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