Just Capitalism

A Christian Ethic of Economic Globalization

Brent Waters

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781611646917
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Just Capitalism is a Christian moral defense of economic globalization as a system that is well-suited to provide the necessary material needs that are prerequisite for human community and flourishing. Global-based market exchange offers the development and distribution of the goods of creation for humans to enjoy and share. Globalization also offers "the most realistic and promising way of exercising a preferential option for the poor." Waters argues that economic globalization, and thus capitalism, is a necessary condition for sustaining human life but not a sufficient condition for enabling human flourishing. Even though globalization is generally compatible with Christian theological and moral claims and can realistically facilitate the well-being of the human family, it must be reoriented toward koinoniahuman community, communication, fellowshipas the global economy's primary goal in order to help actualize human flourishing. Readers will gain insight about how economic globalization (and thus capitalism) is good for the human family and can be made better by certain reorientations that are compatible with Christian moral values. Waters provides a mature and civil counterargument against knee-jerk condemnations of economic globalization and capitalism.

Part 1

Sustaining Human Life

Why Exchange Is Necessary …

Chapter One

Christian Moral Theology and Economics

Christian moral theology has never been entirely comfortable with the topic of riches and possessions. This discomfort is extended to economics, given its association with the creation and distribution of wealth. This discomfort ranges from a reticent distaste of economic exchange as a necessary but crude activity to an evil and destructive practice requiring virulent opposition. This discomfort in turn influences a spectrum of moral assessments of globalization, and more broadly the related issues of capitalism and affluence.

Indeed a popular narrative is promulgated within certain influential Protestant and Catholic circles that the rich have always obtained and maintained their wealth by exploiting the poor. The affluence of the powerful comes at the expense of the weak. Globalization is simply the latest chapter in this sad saga. This story line claims a clear lineage originating in Scripture and descending on through the Christian moral tradition to the present day. It is an admittedly simple and thereby compelling story. It is also a simplistic and thereby misleading story.

In the remainder of this chapter I summarize some of the more prominent features of this narrative and identify some counterthemes it overlooks in its biblical and theological pedigree. I also argue that this story requires extensive revising because its authors and narrators have largely failed to adequately contextualize the topic.

Camels and Needles

In this narrative of the wealthy perennially exploiting the poor, the parable of the rich young man in Mark 10:17–31¹ encapsulates its principal themes. A rich young man asks Jesus what he must do to have eternal life. The young man has scrupulously obeyed God’s commandments, but Jesus informs him that he lacks one thing—he must sell everything he has, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow him. The lad is unwilling to do this, and Jesus remarks, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”²

Three salient precepts may be derived from this parable. First, wealth is an impediment to faith. It is extremely difficult, if not effectively impossible, for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. Second, distributing one’s wealth to the poor is a prerequisite for following Jesus, and by implication, accumulating wealth is incompatible with being a follower of Jesus. Third, the poor are the most deserving recipients of the redistribution of wealth. There were other civic and religious institutions, for instance, that would have benefitted from such largesse, but Jesus does not mention them.

Jesus’ teaching and ministry as recorded in the Gospels reinforce these tenets. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, for example, it is the rich man who suffers the torment of hell.³ In another parable a rich farmer who worries about how best to store his abundant harvest is dismissed as a fool,⁴ for a person’s life has nothing to do with one’s possessions. Most pointedly, Jesus foretells a destiny of misery for the rich and well-fed.⁵ When Zacchaeus promises fourfold restitution to those he has cheated and to give half of what he owns to the poor, Jesus commends it as a salvific act.⁶ Moreover, Jesus insists that his disciples, following his own example, leave their sources of livelihood, such as fishing or tax collecting,⁷ and forbids them to worry about how they will eat or be clothed, but to simply sell their possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.⁸ And they are worthy recipients of such benefaction: Jesus keeps company with the poor and destitute, blessing them in his teaching⁹ and condemning those who ignore them.¹⁰

Early converts in Jerusalem pooled their financial and material resources and redistributed them according to individual needs.¹¹ The fledgling church is admonished not to favor its rich members or in any way demean those who are poor and to clothe and feed those who are in need.¹² More pointedly, Christians are advised to be content with the food and clothing they have, and those wishing to be rich fall into all sorts of temptations and wander away from the faith. “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”¹³ Moreover, there is an extensive and complementary prophetic literature denouncing the unjust treatment of the poor, and proclaiming the hope of God’s deliverance and justice.¹⁴

Much of the early patristic literature reiterates these biblical themes. For example, the Didache echoes biblical teaching on almsgiving. Tertullian, in his Apology, simply assumes that the early church in Jerusalem is the ideal model of Christian community, mentioning a fund for the poor to which church members made voluntary contributions,¹⁵ and Cyprian insisted that wealthy Christians support poorer members of the church.¹⁶ Later writers, however, developed more elaborate assessments of wealth. John Chrysostom chastised well-fed and clothed Christians who ignored or were indifferent to the hungry and homeless,¹⁷ and he urged the rich to donate the income earned from investments to the poor.¹⁸ Moreover, if everyone followed the lead of the early church in Jerusalem, poverty would be eliminated.¹⁹

According to Ambrose, private property—and the wealth it generates—is unnatural. Humans are by nature social and interdependent creatures, “created to help each other.”²⁰ Almsgiving was paying a debt incurred by seizing public property and making it private. As bishop of Milan, his influential preaching prompted generous benefaction to restore, at least in part, this broken social harmony between rich and poor. Although wealth is tainted by these social divisions, generous giving eases the stigma; redistribution is effectively restitution to the poor who have been harmed by the rich. With proper spiritual guidance, wealth can be used to achieve good purposes. Basil the Great went even further, insisting that one’s food, clothing, and money belongs to those in need.²¹

The anonymous Pelagian author of On Riches offered a more critical assessment of wealth.²² Following Pelagius, wealth was grounded in the will, and was therefore the “product of avarice, which was the wish to be rich.”²³ Since wealth stems from the desire to want more, it is therefore intrinsically evil. Consequently, the vice of avarice is the root desire for wealth, and avarice can never be satiated. In this drive to satisfy what cannot be satisfied, crimes are inevitably committed. Private property corrupts that which is naturally common into a brutal zero-sum game of acquisition. In this competition, the wealth of the few can only be gained by impoverishing the many: In Peter Brown’s words, “Whether they were aware of it or not, the rich had actively created the poor. For the rich had won the remorseless tug-of-war for limited resources, which took place to the benefit of the rich. Every time someone overstepped the divinely ordained line of mere sufficiency by becoming rich, others were pulled down into poverty.”²⁴ This treatise stripped the rich of any excuse for being wealthy. Wealth can never be used in a good or right way because its accumulation always entails injustice. The only way to eliminate poverty is to eliminate private wealth.

John Cassian presumably echoed these premises in lifting up Egyptian monastic life as the ideal model because it preserved the original simplicity of the early Jerusalem church. One could enter a monastery following a compulsory disposal of one’s personal possessions. Monks were utterly dependent on the abbot for the basic necessities of food and clothing. This total disposing of material goods generated an absolute equality among the monks, because they were equally dependent on the abbot. Moreover, monks were required to support themselves through physical labor, an act challenging the basic economic premise of the late Roman Empire:

In Cassian’s opinion, the monk was the exact opposite of the leisured rentier. He was the only productive member of society. He depended on himself to feed himself. Everyone else was like a beggar, living on the agape—the handouts—of others. Landowners collecting rents; emperors collecting taxes; compared with monks, they were all parasites, expecting to be fed by others.²⁵

In short, the rich pursue a life of plunder.

Subsequent generations of theologians refined many of these biblical patristic and monastic themes. Francis of Assisi taught that a life of itinerancy and poverty was required in order to emulate Jesus. The orders he founded renounced owning private possessions other than the bare necessity of clothing, and their livelihood depended on alms. In later medieval thought, an impoverished life was often portrayed as idealized norm. The “widespread poverty, vagrancy, and underemployment of the late medieval period was legitimated by the church’s ideology of poverty.”²⁶ Economic exchange was, at best, a vulgar necessity, requiring extensive regulation.

Thomas Aquinas expended considerable time and attention in detailing what kinds of economic and financial exchanges were permissible. Exchange is a natural activity that should benefit both buyer and seller.²⁷ Following the Golden Rule, no one should sell a thing for more than it is worth, or buy a thing for less than it is worth. Selling a thing for more than it is worth is deceit, which is a sin, and presumably an honest consumer will pay the seller more if the object in question is underpriced. The price is based on the quality of the thing being sold, and if the price is not just, then the relationship between buyer and seller is one of injustice. Consequently, the wicked inclination to sell as high as possible and buy as low as possible must be resisted for the sake of justice. Trade is also a natural activity, enabling the existence of households and communities,²⁸ but the only real value of merchants is to “move goods from places of plenty to places of scarcity.”²⁹ Traders may add a modest increase to the price of the goods they sell as compensation for their time and labor. If trading is conducted to maximize profit, however, it becomes a vice and is therefore sinful and unjust.

Thomas also contends that usury³⁰ is always wrong because it involves selling something that does not really exist which is an unjust act.³¹ All objects have their proper use, and if sold for something other than its rightful purpose the resulting profit is unjust because it involves double payment. Money was invented for the purpose of enabling exchange, and can therefore only be properly consumed. Money used to make more money, in short, is an unnatural act. Moreover, usury is wrong and unjust because it exploits the neighbor in need whom we are commanded to love and assist rather than exploit. More explicitly, “Money cannot be sold for a greater sum than the amount lent, which has to be paid back: nor should the loan be made with a demand or expectation of aught else but of a feeling of benevolence which cannot be priced at a pecuniary value, and which can be the basis of a spontaneous loan.”³² To require interest is tantamount to obliging the borrower to loan the lender money at some future date.

During Martin Luther’s career, trade increased dramatically. Concurrently, large banks and other commercial firms were created to facilitate the capital and financing required by these new ventures. Luther had grave misgivings about this enterprise. In his treatise Trade and Usury,³³ he asserts that since merchants believe they have the right to sell their goods for as much as possible, how can trade ever be moral?³⁴ He assumes that maximizing profit can only be achieved at the expense of consumers, exhibiting a disregard for the needs of neighbors in satisfying the greed of merchants. Such exchange is contrary to both natural law and Christian love, effectively rendering trade to “nothing but robbing and stealing the property of others.”³⁵ Consequently, he argues that merchants should be guided by the maxim that they sell their goods at prices that are right and fair. These prices should be determined by the time and effort expended in producing a product in comparison with similar work performed, and any collusion by merchants to fix prices should be prohibited.³⁶

In addition, buying and selling should be on a cash only basis. Lending is perilous and best avoided, for a loan always runs the risk of becoming a gift that is not returned. Lenders accepting this risk, therefore, should not be able to turn to the state to collect unpaid debt on their behalf. More important, “You cannot make money with just money.”³⁷ Charging as high an interest rate as possible, then, is clearly illicit because it fails to display a love of neighbor. In a truly Christian society, commercial banking would not be necessary, and he advocated strict regulation of commerce and banking...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Globalization 3.0
• Part 1: Sustaining Human Life: Why Exchange Is Necessary …
• Part 2: … but Not Sufficient: Enabling Human Flourishing
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index