What do you think?
Rate this book
Divine Economy: Theology and the Market
What has theology to do with economics? This first book to address the question directly will be welcomed by all those with an interest in exploring how theology can inform economic debate.
336 pages, Paperback
First published March 23, 2000
5 people are currently reading
75 people want to read
About the author
D. Stephen Long
29 books11 followersD. Stephen Long is professor of theology and ethics at Southern Methodist University. Previously he worked at Marquette University, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, St. Joseph’s University and Duke Divinity School. He received the PhD from Duke University, and is an ordained United Methodist Minister in the Indiana Conference. He has served churches in Honduras, North Carolina and Milwaukee.
He has published a number of works, including Divine Economy: Theology and the Market (2000), The Goodness of God: Theology, Church, and the Social Order (2001), John Wesley's Moral Theology: The Quest for God and Goodness (2005), and Calculated Future: Theology, Ethics, and Economics (2007).
He has published a number of works, including Divine Economy: Theology and the Market (2000), The Goodness of God: Theology, Church, and the Social Order (2001), John Wesley's Moral Theology: The Quest for God and Goodness (2005), and Calculated Future: Theology, Ethics, and Economics (2007).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 10, 2021
Long’s project explores three ways theology has been brought to bear on economic thinking, through the dominant, emergent, and residual traditions of the twentieth century. The first of these, epitomized in the work of Michael Novak, Max Stackhouse, Dennis McCann, and others, idealizes pluralist Western democracy and maintains a divide between economics and theology based on Max Weber’s fact-value distinction. In their understanding, social sciences, given the right political and cultural environment, are all that are needed to produce a healthy and prosperous economy while theology is relegated to a sort of external moral conscience for guiding this economy. Novak, in particular, sees theology’s primary contribution to economics as freedom, defined in a purely formal sense as the ability to choose and give value to choices. This anthropological liberty stands alongside creation (specifically humans’ roles as co-creators) and original sin as the most common theological themes taken up by the dominant tradition and reflecting its indebtedness to Niebuhrian realism. Long identifies a number of problems in the dominant tradition’s project but focuses mainly on its poor theology—that in focusing on the most universalizable of doctrines, it ignores the necessary and distinctive traditions of Christology and ecclesiology—as well as Weber’s fact-value distinction—which, drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre, he criticizes, saying, “To even attempt to define human action in the same terms as the growth of a sycamore tree or the breeding patterns of a fruitfly is already to see it as less than human” (68). The emergent tradition, represented by Gustavo Gutiérrez, Rosemary Radford Ruether, James Cone, and Jon Sobrino, improves on the dominant in multiple ways: it emphasizes Christian theology, particularly in the work Gutiérrez; appreciates socio-historical context, removing theological value from the purely abstract; and is thus more critical of capitalism. Yet even so, Long does not think these theologians go far enough—they implicitly maintain a fact-value distinction, often appeal to social sciences, continue to emphasize human freedom (even if it is more theologically robust), and inevitably subjugate theology to metaphysics. Though their projects differ widely, they each become more concerned with a liberative framework for interpretation than with the historical witness of the Church. In response to these, Long opts for the third tradition, associated with MacIntyre, Bernard Dempsey, and John Milbank. Each of these thinkers denies the fact-value distinction, advocating instead for a telic view of reality pointing toward the good, the true, and the beautiful. They also each rely on the classical Christian thought of Thomas Aquinas (even though MacIntyre is a philosopher and not a theologian). So while their projects differ—and, in fact, Milbank even critiques elements of MacIntyre’s thought—they share a common solution to the follies of the dominant and emergent traditions through a unified vision of value embedded in reality, so much so that nature can hardly be said to exist apart from grace. This significantly limits the power of the social sciences, and in their place offers a “functional economy” directed by Christian virtue.
Long’s work here is dense, thorough, and, most importantly, relevant to anyone interested in the broad categories of economy and theology. It is also part of the wider radical orthodoxy movement, associated with Milbank, and so its publication is assured a number of avid supports and vehement critics. But one need not buy into Milbank’s project to see the value in what Long has done, outlining the theological and philosophical underpinnings to the two dominant (which what he describes as “emergent” has become) theologies concerning capitalism. Still, readers should advance with caution; Long deals in heavily nuanced interpretations of several prominent thinkers, yet his reading of some is more fair than of others—particularly in his attacks on the theological-ness of the Latin American liberation theologians. Additionally, a great deal of Long’s argument assumes the falsity of Weber’s fact-value distinction, but he does little in the way of defending this central assumption. Beyond recounting some of MacIntyre’s relevant work, Long’s most sustained arguments take the form of the fruitfly quote above and an example about prostitution in the introduction, both of which betray the tone of, Is it not clear? And to some extent, it is. The facts of reality can have moral weight. Yet Long fails to admit the equally obvious fact that economists deal in generalities and trends—and to do otherwise would be a different job. They leave it to the psychologist or pastor to deal with the individual. Moreover, he never addresses the results of capitalism, its reality. He admits at one point that Marxism cannot compete as a social science—capitalism wins every time—it instead competes as a social critique. But if fact and value are identical, then why does the value not reflect the reality of the fact? What is the theological reason that humans flourish—and less people die—under the mechanics of capitalism?
Long’s work here is dense, thorough, and, most importantly, relevant to anyone interested in the broad categories of economy and theology. It is also part of the wider radical orthodoxy movement, associated with Milbank, and so its publication is assured a number of avid supports and vehement critics. But one need not buy into Milbank’s project to see the value in what Long has done, outlining the theological and philosophical underpinnings to the two dominant (which what he describes as “emergent” has become) theologies concerning capitalism. Still, readers should advance with caution; Long deals in heavily nuanced interpretations of several prominent thinkers, yet his reading of some is more fair than of others—particularly in his attacks on the theological-ness of the Latin American liberation theologians. Additionally, a great deal of Long’s argument assumes the falsity of Weber’s fact-value distinction, but he does little in the way of defending this central assumption. Beyond recounting some of MacIntyre’s relevant work, Long’s most sustained arguments take the form of the fruitfly quote above and an example about prostitution in the introduction, both of which betray the tone of, Is it not clear? And to some extent, it is. The facts of reality can have moral weight. Yet Long fails to admit the equally obvious fact that economists deal in generalities and trends—and to do otherwise would be a different job. They leave it to the psychologist or pastor to deal with the individual. Moreover, he never addresses the results of capitalism, its reality. He admits at one point that Marxism cannot compete as a social science—capitalism wins every time—it instead competes as a social critique. But if fact and value are identical, then why does the value not reflect the reality of the fact? What is the theological reason that humans flourish—and less people die—under the mechanics of capitalism?
November 3, 2009
You know, I really had high hopes for this book, and even when I heard pretty harsh critiques of it from others, I gave it the benefit of the doubt, and assumed the critics were asses. But, it's really quite disappointing, even though I agree with where Long is trying to go in it. Two stars is low, and I certainly could give it three stars, on the basis of all the excellent and learned bits in it. But these bits are not developed into a coherent whole, but remain scattered and confusing.
And I make it two stars on the basis of the "to whom much is given, much is expected" principle. Long was given the opportunity to write a book as part of the Radical Orthodoxy series--you can't get much more high-flying than that. And he blew it. Here's the longer review, that I typed up for class:
This book had a lot of promise, but unfortunately, most of it was wasted by the poor organization and gaps in Long’s argument. I found myself frustrated by at least four major structural deficiencies in this book.
1)Long’s tendency to go into long asides and rabbit-trails which seem irrelevant to the point at hand. Sometimes, it turns out that they are in fact quite relevant, but you don’t figure out how until much later; meanwhile, you’re just confused. Often, though, Long never adequately demonstrates their relevance, and one gets the idea that Long simply had too many ideas spinning through his head and tried to cram them all into this book without first weeding through to find the really significant ones and then narrating them into a coherent whole.
2) Long’s three-part division into dominant, emergent, and residual traditions. Although a strategy like this can be helpful for making sense of a very complicated jumble of thinkers, in this case the organizational strategy makes matters more, rather than less confusing. Much better, I think, would be to have taken a chapter to examine each of the major thinkers on his own terms, and in the process, point out areas of similarities and difference from each of the others. As it is, by trying to make thinkers with very diverse perspectives, emphases, starting-points, and ending-points fit into neat categories, he seems to rarely do justice to each thinker’s perspective, or to make clear exactly what their weaknesses are. This was particularly glaring in the section on the “emergent tradition,” in which I had really looked forward to the discussion of liberation theology. The liberation theologians, who, whatever their faults, took the historic Christian faith and the witness of Scripture seriously, were seriously mistreated by being lumped together with Cone and Ruether, both of whom (especially Ruether) denied much of orthodox Christian teaching. This was especially unhelpful, since Ruether and Cone contributed almost nothing to the discussion of economics per se.
3) The book failed to live up to its promise of telling us what theology has to do with economics, mainly because it didn’t really tell us that much about economics, or engage with it in much detail. The review by Oslington, an economist, complained that Long seemed woefully ignorant of much of economics, and though I’m no economist, I was frustrated by the lack of precision and concreteness in Long’s critiques of capitalism. The book was long on vague notions like “scarcity” and “freedom” and “value,” but rather short on specific elucidations of the teachings of modern economics and its shortcomings.
4) Finally, on a related note, the book fell short when it came to offering clear solutions the the problems it identified. The third section, which I had hoped would finally provide some answers, remained somewhat unfocused and inconclusive. When he came to Milbank, Long finally seemed to have found someone that he could almost entirely agree with (though he still bickered with him about some issues which seemed rather tangential), but he closed the book without developing Milbank’s solutions at any length or in terms of specific applications.
Nevertheless, Long certainly has a fairly profound grasp of theology (at least the radically orthodox variety) and he offered excellent food for thought at a number of points.
In particular, his critique of the fact-value distinction as a root problem of capitalism, and of theologies that endorse it, is quite fruitful. The world does not simply consist of neutral facts that we can subsequently modify in a limited degree on the basis of our values. Facts are inherently value-laden, for good or ill depending on whether or not they conform to their proper telos (the discussion of MacIntyre is especially helpful here). Theologians who accept this distinction conclude that economics can function as an autonomous science describing facts, over which theology can thin lay a thin veneer of values. Such an approach necessarily means that theology can only speak to economics in terms of vague abstractions, like “creation” “original sin” “freedom,” etc. Since the discipline of economics has its own integrity as a true narrative of the world, the specific narrative of Christian theology has little to say to it. Thus theology is deprived of almost all of its uniquely Christian content before it can speak to economics, and its contribution becomes essentially meaningless, as Long shows fairly convincingly in his treatment of the dominant tradition.
The same fact-value distinction is not adequately overcome by the emergent tradition, who still allow social science to do a lot of the work in describing the “facts” of the world, leaving theology’s contribution insufficient.
Another helpful point is how he shows that both the dominant and emergent traditions have espoused too much a negative notion of freedom, a liberty which seeks freedom from all oppressive constraints. Because of this, neither has been able to sustain a robust ecclesiology, for the Church is necessarily a restraint on such libertine freedom, although it enables the richer freedom of life in God. Long rightly sees (although I think he inadequately develops) that a proper answer to the problems that capitalism poses can only be achieved through the form of ecclesiology.
Anyhow, a much better read by the same author on the same topic is Calculated Futures.
---
update:
after discussion in class and some reflection, I decided to be a bit nicer, and give him three stars, though with some hesitation.
And I make it two stars on the basis of the "to whom much is given, much is expected" principle. Long was given the opportunity to write a book as part of the Radical Orthodoxy series--you can't get much more high-flying than that. And he blew it. Here's the longer review, that I typed up for class:
This book had a lot of promise, but unfortunately, most of it was wasted by the poor organization and gaps in Long’s argument. I found myself frustrated by at least four major structural deficiencies in this book.
1)Long’s tendency to go into long asides and rabbit-trails which seem irrelevant to the point at hand. Sometimes, it turns out that they are in fact quite relevant, but you don’t figure out how until much later; meanwhile, you’re just confused. Often, though, Long never adequately demonstrates their relevance, and one gets the idea that Long simply had too many ideas spinning through his head and tried to cram them all into this book without first weeding through to find the really significant ones and then narrating them into a coherent whole.
2) Long’s three-part division into dominant, emergent, and residual traditions. Although a strategy like this can be helpful for making sense of a very complicated jumble of thinkers, in this case the organizational strategy makes matters more, rather than less confusing. Much better, I think, would be to have taken a chapter to examine each of the major thinkers on his own terms, and in the process, point out areas of similarities and difference from each of the others. As it is, by trying to make thinkers with very diverse perspectives, emphases, starting-points, and ending-points fit into neat categories, he seems to rarely do justice to each thinker’s perspective, or to make clear exactly what their weaknesses are. This was particularly glaring in the section on the “emergent tradition,” in which I had really looked forward to the discussion of liberation theology. The liberation theologians, who, whatever their faults, took the historic Christian faith and the witness of Scripture seriously, were seriously mistreated by being lumped together with Cone and Ruether, both of whom (especially Ruether) denied much of orthodox Christian teaching. This was especially unhelpful, since Ruether and Cone contributed almost nothing to the discussion of economics per se.
3) The book failed to live up to its promise of telling us what theology has to do with economics, mainly because it didn’t really tell us that much about economics, or engage with it in much detail. The review by Oslington, an economist, complained that Long seemed woefully ignorant of much of economics, and though I’m no economist, I was frustrated by the lack of precision and concreteness in Long’s critiques of capitalism. The book was long on vague notions like “scarcity” and “freedom” and “value,” but rather short on specific elucidations of the teachings of modern economics and its shortcomings.
4) Finally, on a related note, the book fell short when it came to offering clear solutions the the problems it identified. The third section, which I had hoped would finally provide some answers, remained somewhat unfocused and inconclusive. When he came to Milbank, Long finally seemed to have found someone that he could almost entirely agree with (though he still bickered with him about some issues which seemed rather tangential), but he closed the book without developing Milbank’s solutions at any length or in terms of specific applications.
Nevertheless, Long certainly has a fairly profound grasp of theology (at least the radically orthodox variety) and he offered excellent food for thought at a number of points.
In particular, his critique of the fact-value distinction as a root problem of capitalism, and of theologies that endorse it, is quite fruitful. The world does not simply consist of neutral facts that we can subsequently modify in a limited degree on the basis of our values. Facts are inherently value-laden, for good or ill depending on whether or not they conform to their proper telos (the discussion of MacIntyre is especially helpful here). Theologians who accept this distinction conclude that economics can function as an autonomous science describing facts, over which theology can thin lay a thin veneer of values. Such an approach necessarily means that theology can only speak to economics in terms of vague abstractions, like “creation” “original sin” “freedom,” etc. Since the discipline of economics has its own integrity as a true narrative of the world, the specific narrative of Christian theology has little to say to it. Thus theology is deprived of almost all of its uniquely Christian content before it can speak to economics, and its contribution becomes essentially meaningless, as Long shows fairly convincingly in his treatment of the dominant tradition.
The same fact-value distinction is not adequately overcome by the emergent tradition, who still allow social science to do a lot of the work in describing the “facts” of the world, leaving theology’s contribution insufficient.
Another helpful point is how he shows that both the dominant and emergent traditions have espoused too much a negative notion of freedom, a liberty which seeks freedom from all oppressive constraints. Because of this, neither has been able to sustain a robust ecclesiology, for the Church is necessarily a restraint on such libertine freedom, although it enables the richer freedom of life in God. Long rightly sees (although I think he inadequately develops) that a proper answer to the problems that capitalism poses can only be achieved through the form of ecclesiology.
Anyhow, a much better read by the same author on the same topic is Calculated Futures.
---
update:
after discussion in class and some reflection, I decided to be a bit nicer, and give him three stars, though with some hesitation.
August 14, 2010
Didn't get too much out of this book. Long looks at the theological content of a few of the more extreme amalgams of religion and economics. He points out how some who have adopted the neoliberal view see free markets as being holier than the Gospel message itself (God help us!) And also the liberation theology movement, which more or less sought to transform scripture into a class conflict metaphor.
Running with the Radical Orthodox crowd, Long drives home when and how economics ceased to be a matter of religious importance and subsequently how more modern attempts to revive the two generally see theology bowing toward secular economics.
Running with the Radical Orthodox crowd, Long drives home when and how economics ceased to be a matter of religious importance and subsequently how more modern attempts to revive the two generally see theology bowing toward secular economics.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews