Harvard Divinity Bulletin - Kathryn Tanner - What Does Grace Have to Do With Money?

What Does Grace Have to Do With Money?
Theology Within a Comparative Economy
by Kathryn Tanner

The donor's mandate to the Lentz Lecturer is to reflect on the "inspiring" words "for Christ and Church" (christo et ecclesiae) that once appeared on the Harvard College seal. This mandate would seem to be drawing the lecturer's attention to the fact that, at Harvard, theological education occurs within a university curriculum—the Divinity School having its place, of course, within the wider, hallowed halls of Harvard, theological education within the Divinity School itself involving interdisciplinary and religiously pluralistic course offerings not all that dissimilar from those to be found in a religious studies department of a liberal arts college. In keeping with such a mandate, one thing I'd like to do in this lecture is develop a wide scholarly frame—the frame of comparative economy, as I'll call it—in which words about Christ and the church (words of grace, most generally) could find their voice in the university, a wide scholarly frame in which words of grace might be heard in a way that inspires, incites, provokes, and challenges.

With its reference to the Harvard seal, the donor's mandate might also be leading the lecturer to bring a general question like this about the place of theological education in the university into focus in a certain way. What do Christ and the church have to do with a university like Harvard would become, more specifically, what do Christ and the church have to do with a community dedicated to pursuit of the truth—the veritas of the present Harvard seal. I hope my audience forgives me and deems me not too ungracious, if, on this occasion of a generously endowed lectureship, at this university known as much for its wealth as for its intellectual excellence, I take the question to be, instead, what does grace have to do with money?

Forgive me and think me not insufferably ungracious or cynical if I say now, too, that the easy answer to a question like this, at a place such as this—when asked on this occasion, at this university—is, of course: everything. Grace has everything to do with money. The more difficult questions, to which this lecture is dedicated, are how and why.

Let us begin by asking what sort of connection between the two is being suggested if one says that grace has everything to do with money, or, for that matter, that money has everything to do with grace. What are you trying to get at in either case? What probably first comes to mind, especially when the claims are expressed so baldly and so generally, is a semantic relationship between the two. That is, money means grace—it means one has grace; it's an indication of one's graced state. Or, grace means money—it means one has money; the grace one has, one's religious standing, is an indication of one's economic status. In other words, probably the most common way of understanding the relationship between the two, in either case, is to understand it as a relationship between a meaning and its sign, between a signified and its signifier, between what is unpresentable and invisible, on the one hand, and its presentable and sensible replacement or substitute, on the other. In the one case, grace is the meaning and money its sign; in the other, money is the signified, grace its signifier. To say that grace has everything to do with money or money everything to do with grace is therefore to engage, implicitly at least, in an exercise of hermeneutical decoding: it is to suggest, in other words, what grace or money, now taken as a sign, really means; it is to go underneath money or grace to its real and otherwise hidden meaning.

Take the one case: money has everything to do with grace; money means grace. The history of Christian faith and practice is full of the search for signs of grace, money being just one of them. Grace is invisible, a spiritual and internal matter of the conversion of hearts and minds. Grace is as invisible as any of God's own acts that are unpresentable in their transcendence, in their difference from everything finite that can be pictured and imaged. To be sure of one's graced state therefore requires one to be assured by way of grace's signs. One's bodily state, bodily disciplines, are often taken for such signs: the sweet odor of the saints, despite their refusal of all normal standards of hygiene; their incorruptible bodies despite the mortification of the flesh, despite the ascetical rigors to which they've been subjected, despite the length of time they've been in the grave. Control over the body and its insistent needs is taken, too, to be a sign of the workings of grace, a sign of one's spiritual virtuosity. Here it is the voluntary abnegation of wealth, voluntary poverty, among ascetics and monastic devotees, that becomes a sign of grace.

Especially, however, with the birth of a state church in the age of Constantine, power, privilege, and success are often taken for such signs. Those in charge, those whom the fates of this world favor, are the chosen of God, God's lieutenants and servants. Constantine's victory over his rivals is an indication of his being favored by God; the church's victory over paganism by way of Constantine's rule is a sign of the grace that the church has been given. Indeed, the very wealth that once adorned pagan altars has been stripped from them, to be used for the building of churches. Here is the famous proof for Christianity from its spread—the success of Christianity as a world religion being the proof of the spirit and the power with which God has invested it.

Under this rubric, too, one finds success in one's calling as a sign of grace in Protestant, especially Calvinist, circles. The perennial need to know about one's graced state is here heightened—by the threat of a God who might as well damn to all eternity as save, by the inscrutability of God's decrees despite the revealed will of God to save in Christ, by the loss of the reliability of the usual sacramental signs of grace in a corrupt church, by recognition of one's own liability to self-deception, by one's own inability to effect the religious outcome of one's life—the less you can do about your salvation the more you want to know whether you are saved or not. Despite traditional worries about the corrupting influence of money, success in one's worldly calling steps into the breach. The elect of God are the very ones whose self-discipline and asceticism in worldly life make for economic success. The elect of God are the very ones able to adjust themselves to the disciplines of capitalist calculation at its beginnings, the very ones who become rich in a capitalist sense by saving, by amassing capital, rather than spending. So the religious justification for the life of the petit bourgeoisie is born, and, along with it, the association of poverty with moral and spiritual degradation. Sociologists interested in the normative preconditions for capitalist forms of production and exchange—such as Max Weber—are, of course, happy to reproduce theological arguments of this sort, in which monetary success becomes the sign of grace, for their own descriptive and explanatory purposes.

Now let's come at things from the other side: grace has everything to do with money. Here divisions in the distribution of grace—religious differences most generally, differences in religious commitment, differences in religious affiliation—are taken to be signs of economic differences, differences, for example, in class or status grouping. In this case (where grace is viewed as the sign rather than the signified) money, and socio-political status most generally, are what cannot be mentioned. Or money and class are the unmentionable, what shouldn't be mentioned in polite society or in the supposedly classless society of the United States, what, indeed, the veil of religion keeps from being mentioned as such. For money, grace is substituted, as money's representation, its representable stand-in or sign.

So, from a Marxist point of view, religious conflict in the Reformation over the means of grace—over sacramental means, over faith or works as conditions of grace—becomes a sign of economic and political conflict where a specifically economic and political vocabulary for engaging such conflicts is absent. People fight about religion at historical points where their real concerns for money and power cannot be raised directly or purely. Or, in cases where money and class can be mentioned but are being obfuscated, religious commitment and affiliation are simply part of the lifestyle markers for particular economic and social classes. So (depending on the time and place) an interest in the Church of England may mark you as a member of, or aspirant to, a particular social class, just as one's disinterest and failure to attend services marks you as a member of some other. Episcopalians, at one time at least, tended to be members of the American nobility—Episcopalianism being one among a number of other lifestyle markers of such a class, which included, say, drinking and a certain laxity about moral concerns. (I'm an Episcopalian by the way!) Evangelical groups, especially upon their breakaway from a prior denomination, tend to be populated by those of lower economic and social status, etc. Here the religious markers of class help to disguise the importance of economic and social differences by naturalizing them: what could be more natural than to be a member of the ruling class if one is Episcopalian? The religious markers of class in this way help prevent, they distract one from, a more straightforwardly socioeconomic and political analysis of the reasons for inequitable distributions of power and wealth in society. At least, that's the effect of religious markers of class before their demystification by a sociology of religion—a sociology of religion offering a hermeneutical key to their true interpretation and function. The specifically theological variant of this interpretation of religious affiliation as a signifier for money and class is found, for example, in H. Richard Niebuhr's Social Sources of Denominationalism: Denominational divisions in the church universal, which match up with class, ethnic, and racial divides, are taken to be signs of corruption, corruption by nonreligious interests, by the forces of money and of racial and ethnic bias.

Now these semantic readings of the relationship between grace and money—where either money or grace is sign or signifier—are all to the good in that they make clear the way religious concerns are bound up with those of an economic and sociopolitical nature. The semantic reading of those interrelations, however, forces a certain reductionism in the analysis—in two ways. First, the semantic framing of the relationship brings with it a simple correspondence between religious claim and economic status as the default mode of analysis. The potential differences between the two registers of grace and money are thereby occluded. For every grace there is its corresponding equivalent on the economic front (or the reverse): one searches for the matching sign for this particular signified; the matching signified for this particular sign.

Secondly, in virtue simply of the semantic framing of the relationship, one or the other term—either grace or money, whichever one is viewed as the meaning of the other—is given an automatic explanatory privilege. What's really at issue is grace or what's really at issue is money. One is the appearance; the other is the reality. One is the epiphenomenon; the other the phenomenon. One is the superstructure; the other the base. (This second sort of reductionism is also a feature of causal accounts of the relationship between grace and money—for example, where the question is how a concern for assurance of grace in Calvinism produces norms and behaviors necessary for a capitalist economy. The means/end character of the relationship brings with it a subordination of the term identified with the means, the end naturally being privileged over the means. So, for Max Weber, interest in the subjective motivations of the religious believer is ultimately replaced by interest in whatever might maintain the simple behaviors conforming to capitalist dictates, by interest in the functional equivalents of religious belief once capitalism is up and running.)

A more complex and less presumptive framing for the relationship, as one finds it in the sociological literature, always involves, it seems to me, a shift to a nonsemantic or formal mode of comparative analysis, like that found prototypically in structuralism (a shift that doesn't necessarily bring with it, as we'll see, the purely synchronic and politically naïve features that usually mar structuralism). Here one doesn't ask what grace means as if it doesn't mean what it appears to mean, being a sign of something else. One doesn't have to ask this because the connection between grace and money is not established by showing that grace means money. The connection is established instead by looking at the formal features of the two, at least relatively, autonomous spheres. Whatever grace means—and it may mean nothing like what money means—the two may be brought into connection, correspondences may be established, between the formal features of the respective differential networks or fields that either grace or money establishes. In short, one compares the system of exchanges, substitutions, and circulations that hold for grace and for money, respectively, without having to presume, substantively, that money and grace are at all alike. One simply asks, for example, how is grace distributed? Is it distributed the way money is distributed? And how might the two forms of distribution intersect in particular times and places, by way of structural or formal parallels between the two?

For a simple case of such an intersection between relatively autonomous fields or networks of grace and money respectively, take the way a religious worldview—say, a Protestant rejection of institutionally mediated forms of grace—arises in response (at least in part) to specifically religious needs and anxieties, and then enters into a primarily economically determined distribution of statuses. It enters into that economic sphere by way of an elective affinity between certain structural elements of that religious worldview and a lifestyle associated with a particular economic status. For example, independent entrepreneurs making up the new merchant class in early modern Europe feel themselves to be on their own economically the way Protestants are on their own religiously—that's the sort of formal affinity to be found here between the relatively autonomous fields of grace and economic status. In virtue of such an elective affinity the members of this status group become the carriers of such a religious worldview—its primary adherents—and thereby alter the development of that religious perspective so as to bring about greater conformity between it and the interests and needs of this particular class. This is at a minimum the sort of more complex analysis that would replace a simple semantic framing of the relationship between money and grace. It's Weberian in character.

What categories might one use to frame such a formal or structural comparison between grace and money? This is a crucial question. In comparative frameworks influenced by structuralism (that of Claude Levi-Strauss in particular), the categories enabling formal comparison among all fields (cultural, social, economic, religious, etc.)—categories of exchange, distribution, transformation, and substitution—are derived primarily from linguistics, and from a very peculiar form of linguistics at that. Structural linguistics is a form of linguistics that stresses static, already established linguistic systems, rather than asking about the complex, conflict-laden processes by which a linguistic system (like standard English) comes to be established. Structuralism also isolates such systems from their actual uses in politically and economically charged situations. Use of the categories of structural linguistics therefore has the effect of de-politicizing the framing categories for comparison. The comparisons themselves seem therefore to be taken out of any conflict-ridden, politically and economically charged space.

To remedy these defects, sociologists and anthropologists like Pierre Bourdieu, who is a follower of Max Weber in this regard, substitute economic categories for linguistic ones, or give those linguistic categories an economic spin. One can place religion and money in the same analytic space or frame by talking of religious interests and investments, and attempts to monopolize grace (as Weber already did); one can talk of specifically religious forms of capital. Every field is defined by some sort of good or value specific to it; every field establishes the value of a particular sort of good, which all the participants in the field have an investment in or they wouldn't be participating in it. In the case of Christianity, let's say the good or value that defines the field is salvation. All the participants in the field are after that good or value; those are the stakes of the game. The field amounts, therefore, to the establishment of a market in that sort of good or value. The participants are distributed differently in the space of the field by their abilities to gain it, by their capital—by whatever it is, specific to this field, that enables one to achieve the goods of the field. In the Christian case, grace and the means to grace would constitute these field-specific resources or capital.

The two forms of reductionism I mentioned in the case of semantic theories of the relationship between grace and money have a tendency to return here, however.

On the face of it, it might seem that the presumption of a simply correspondence between the two, between grace and money, would be avoided—that first form of reductionism. It no longer makes sense, for example, to assume that those who occupy a dominant position in the religious field correspond to those with a dominant position in the economic or political field—to assume, say, that members of the dominant established or national church are always members of the establishment (in a 1960s sense of that word). At most, Weber and Bourdieu are on the look out for structural connections or homologies across fields where relations between positions in one field reflect relations between positions in another. For example, golf is to professional wrestling in the field of sports what doctors and lawyers are to factory workers in the field of economic employment; therefore hitting the tees conveys white-collar distinction; while yelling for blood at a World Wrestling Federation match is a marker of blue-collar style. Rather than dominance in the religious field directly matching up as a matter of course with dominance in the economic, social and political fields, religious investments are, as often as not, out of sync with one's economic or political capital. This is likely because, as Weber argued, specifically religious interests in salvation take their start at least from dissatisfaction with the distributions of other sorts of goods—from the sense that a society's norms for economic and political distribution are not reflected in the realities of social life, or from worries, in any case, about the justice and meaning of inequalities in the social and economic distribution of goods. Because of this dynamic, the massing of religious capital is often compensatory, making up for the lack of capital on the economic, social or political fronts. People in the lower classes of society don't adhere to a religion that immediately reflects their social status, then. They are attracted to a religious perspective that offers them a form of religious capital at variance with the quality or quantity of capital they have in other spheres. For example, they are attracted to evangelical forms of Christianity (say, Baptist congregations, or Methodism in its early days) where the distribution of grace, by way of the workings of the Spirit, floats free of, and therefore fails to correspond to, the social distribution of wealth.

Weber's and Bourdieu's interest in homologies or structural parallels across fields has the tendency however to support a sort of historicist assumption—the assumption, in other words, that all the fields (religious, economic, etc.) in any one time and place are structurally similar. A very interesting case of this historicist assumption is found in the work of Jean-Joseph Goux, who constructs a general theory of stages of symbolization to make sense of what logocentrism, phallocentrism, monotheism, and the dominance of the money medium have in common. What they all have in common is the construction of what Goux, following Marx, calls a general equivalent of value. Comparing the values of materially quite different things, whether that comparison be conceptual, religious, or economic, requires the creation of a norm for value more abstract than anything subject to comparison. Take the case of simple barter: I'll make you dinner if you cut my hair. Implicit in the transaction is the appeal to some notion of value more abstract than the value of the meal or the hair cutting, which establishes the equivalence of the exchange. The development of currency, of money, makes this appeal to some more abstract notion of value explicit, and regularizes transactions by way of a single agreed upon standard or norm of value. The wider the field of comparison (i.e., the more disparate the work that this norm for value performs) the more abstract the norm for value becomes until it is the general equivalent for anything and everything in the field subject to comparative evaluation. The general equivalent can now replace or be the stand-in for anything in the field, at the same time as it tends to be projected out of the field as a whole as the transcendent, supreme value ordering and directing every exchange beneath it and serving as the guarantee for any value achieved by way of those transactions.

So, at whatever historical stage in the process one happens to be looking at, say, the last one mentioned (there are others after it too), God in the religious field would correspond to the gold standard of the economic sphere. God is the supreme value locked away from the sphere of this-worldly transaction in some heavenly Fort Knox of transcendence, the supreme value to which everything in the world, if it is genuinely to be valuable, must ultimately be convertible: God like the gold standard must stand behind it as its value in hard cash. In much earlier economic periods, the God of an iconoclastic monotheism would fail to appear or intervene in the representable, material transactions of everyday life just as money fails to appear or intervene as the facilitator of economic exchange in a primarily barter economy—where money is used to evaluate the worth of what is exchanged but doesn't itself change hands in the transactions.

Goux recognizes that the stages of symbolization of the general equivalent needn't occur at the same time in the different spheres of religion, economy, and philosophy, but clearly a correspondence among the various fields is assumed as the historical baseline. An idea of God that doesn't correspond to the stage that the general equivalent has reached in the economy is either an anachronism (a remnant of an historically superseded stage of symbolization) or utopian (a mere idea without any correspondence to the realities of economic fact).

Weber and Bourdieu are able to avoid this totalizing of historical periods that I've just been talking about the more they see society and historical periods not as wholes but as made up of competing status groups and classes. And that is indeed typical of their position—in contrast to, say, Durkheimian forms of functionalism. But Bourdieu, like Weber, holds certain old-fashioned views of socialization that get in the way of a full repudiation of totalizing forms of historicism. Despite the innovations in his understanding of the habitus (which include an emphasis on the body and a refusal of overly intellectualized and mechanically routinized accounts of socialization), Bourdieu's primary model of socialization via the habitus is one in which one naturally develops just those dispositions for action and thought that correspond to one's particular social and economic placement, dispositions that therefore naturally serve to reproduce the very social and economic structures that gave rise to them. The model therefore is primarily one that presumes correspondence among fields as its baseline.

The second aspect of reductionism in Bourdieu's economic framing of comparison is quite explicit and comes from a too narrowly drawn understanding of the economic. Bourdieu avoids reductionism by allowing each field to define its own distinctive interests: The religious field is not defined by an interest in money but by an interest in salvation and in the means to getting it—grace. In the example Bourdieu is fond of giving in reply to the charge of reductionism: the artistic field is not defined by an interest in money, but, if anything, by an interest in being disinterested in money. (Bourdieu is clearly unfamiliar with the art market in major American cities like New York!) This relative autonomy among the interests of various fields doesn't mean, however, for Bourdieu, that there isn't a competition within each and every field for distinction in accordance with its particular field-specific value. Bourdieu fully expects, for example, a competition for status by way of the achievement of disinterestedness to characterize the artistic field. The relative autonomy of the interests of different fields therefore doesn't extend to the character of their markets. Whatever the interests of the field, the market set-up is always like a competitive monetary market. Whatever the field, one is always trying to maximize one's capital, dominate the market in the good at issue, and achieve distinction through an ideally exclusive possession of that good, over and against one's competitors in the field. Grace, then, like disinterestedness in the artistic field, would have to circulate like money.

Now in charging this strong economic framing of comparison with reductionism I would hate to lose what's valuable about it. One of Bourdieu's intents here is clearly to avoid the over-idealization of intellectual and cultural fields. He's trying to get away from the idea that those fields are somehow above it all, above being embroiled in the sort of fights over power and status that are so obvious in the economic and political arenas of life. Far be it from me, at Harvard no less, to deny that fights like that go on in the cultural dimension! One can retain this valuable insight; what one must not do, however, is use it to exclude the possibility that some fields are working to establish noncompetitive forms of circulation. What is most interesting about the distribution of grace, it seems to me, is just this proposal of a non-monetary, anti-monetary (because noncompetitive) market in goods.

By focusing exclusively on a competitive market in grace, neither Weber nor Bourdieu is able to pick up on this. Observe, for example, how Weber and Bourdieu discuss controversies over the means of grace between clerics and charismatic religious virtuosos. The religious virtuoso does an end-around the cleric by claiming the status of graced person in virtue of an institutionally unmediated relationship with God—a relationship that does not come by way of official role or educational certification. This achievement is a rare one, distinguishing the religious virtuoso from all other believers, who, as Schleiermacher would say, are mere believers at second-hand. The cleric offers to all these others a kind of democratization of grace: nothing is difficult here, all you have to do is come to church. And in the process solidifies the clerical monopoly on the means of grace: everybody can get grace but only at the hands of a priest. The religious virtuoso can, however, makes his or her own appeal to all those whom the clerical hierarchy disadvantages, to the masses of religious people whose status is low in institutional and educational terms, whether in or outside of church. Whatever one's position in institutionalized hierarchies of whatever kind, one can achieve the very highest status in religious terms through the way modeled for you by the religious virtuoso. The hierarchies that disadvantage you are corrupt; you have a worthiness in the eyes of God as great as any priest; God has a special regard and mission for those who are lowly in the eyes of the world; one's true status will become clear in the future or after death. By way of this sort of appeal, the religious virtuoso might, indeed, achieve the highest religious status as the founder of a new religious movement.

Overlooked in this account of struggles for status by way of struggles over the means of grace is something I think the historical record also makes quite clear. That for all the status warfare one thing that the oppressed are looking for, and attracted to in religion, is a way out of the competitive circulation of goods. They hope not for a status to rival the great but for a circulation of goods without status rivalry. What attracts the oppressed is a vision of a grace offered to all without regard for distinctions of status: the lowly in the eyes of the world or in the eyes of the institutionalized church can have it just as well as the privileged can. This grace is offered freely to all; to be favored by God with it one does not have to be learned or wealthy or socially well connected or male or white. So Donald Matthews describes religion in the Old South: " ‘God is no respecter of persons' (Acts 10:34) was one of the most popular biblical passages in black Christianity, cropping up as it did in sermons, conversations, reminiscences, and confrontations with white people."¹

In the distribution of grace distinctions of status make no difference. In the first place, certainly, because the distribution of grace does not follow the lines of already established differences of status. But, in the second place, because the distribution of grace needn't itself produce or foster any new competitive markets in status. The distribution of grace need not, in other words, establish simply an alternative competition for status, with new standards to replace the old, discriminating between high and low now not on the basis of economic achievement or social standing, but with reference to one's holiness or the genuineness of one's conversion experience. Nor need grace be merely an alternative means to elevation in the eyes of the world, a way of aspiring to a higher social class through the proposal of a new form of capital. Although it happens frequently enough, there is no necessity to the fact that, as H. Richard Niebuhr elegantly expresses it, "the history of denominationalism reveals itself as the history of the religiously neglected poor, who fashion a new type of Christianity which corresponds to their distinctive needs, who rise in the economic scale under the influence of religious discipline, and who, in the midst of a freshly acquired cultural respectability, neglect the new poor succeeding them on the lower plane."² Running contrary to this dynamic, grace is often thought to be always directed especially to the lowly in order to raise all to a common height.

In these regards, the religions of the oppressed are true to, the saviors and keepers of, a neglected strand of thinking present in Christianity from the very beginning. On this way of looking at things, what is notable about Christianity as a field, what is unusual about it, is its attempt to institute a circulation of goods to be possessed by all in the same fullness of degree without diminution or loss, a distribution that in its prodigal promiscuity calls forth neither the pride of superior position nor rivalrous envy among its recipients.

Breaking this down into its various elements: The good is distributed by God, and is to be distributed by us in imitation of God, in an indiscriminate, profligate fashion which fails to reflect the differences in worthiness and status that rule the arrangements of a sinful world. The purpose of the giving is elevation, without limit, so as to bring all recipients to the level of the giver, ultimately God. The whole is given to each or at the very least is continually being offered to each, awaiting the expansion, which God and the followers of God are also trying to bring about, of the recipients capacity to receive the whole. The good is distributed without loss by the giver. The recipient doesn't amass the good in a static way, as a good simply to be kept; the recipient doesn't hold the good simply for itself, as a form of exclusive possession. There is no point to any of that since the giver is more itself and more perfectly itself in giving to others. The reception of the good by others increases or confirms (in the case of God) the giver's own goodness.

These unusual characteristics of Christianity as a field are, I think, one reason for the appeal of Platonism at Christianity's start; Christianity (along with some forms of Neo-Platonism) selects for aspects of Platonism like these. The heavens for Plato form a realm of harmony, without jealousy or strife. In Plato's myth of the winged soul's fall, the soul aspires to "the heavens . . . where the blessed gods pass to and fro, each doing his or her own work, and within them are all such as will and can follow them, for Jealousy has no place in the choir divine. . . . Such is the life of the gods . . . as for the rest, though all are eager to reach the heights and seek to follow they are not able; sucked down as they travel they trample and tread on one another, this one striving to outstrip that. Thus, confusion ensues and conflict and grievous sweat."³ The creator of the world, again according to Plato in the Timaeus this time, creates the world according to the model of this divine world—without jealousy: "[The creator of the world] was good and the good cannot be jealous of anything. And being free of jealousy, the creator desired that all things should be as like himself as possible."⁴ Without jealousy are those who imitate the gods, the teachers and students, lovers and beloveds, of this world at its best, according to Plato, each of whom is to be made like the gods through the mutually–elevating influences of every other. Plato in the Phaedrus in this way proposes a paradigm of reciprocal benefit in loving absent from either heterosexual or homosexual love (for different reasons) in the ancient world: Whatever good the lover draws from the gods, who offer the good without jealousy, is to be poured out onto the beloved, so that as one is drawn up to the gods so also is the other.

This affirmation of giving out of one's own fullness and without loss, to those in need for the very purpose of making them "rivals" in one's own gifts, can be found everywhere in Christianity, if one's looking for it. It's evident in all the topics of Christian theology, at least as a submerged theme—in the account of trinitarian relations, God's creation of the world, God's presence to the world, God's distribution of all the goods of grace from creation to salvation, and in the account of our responsibilities to others. The whole Christian story, from top to bottom, can be viewed as an account of the production of value and the distribution of goods, following this peculiar noncompetitive shape.

It's to be found throughout the whole history of Christian thought in the most unexpected places perhaps—from Dionysius the Aereopagite through Thomas Aquinas to Luther, for example, and to name just a few. It is the love of the hierarch in Dionysius that gives for the benefit of subordinates, so that they too may receive the very same benefit. It is the faith and love, for Luther, "by which a human being is placed between God and her neighbor as a medium which receives from above and gives out again below, and is like a vessel or tube through which the stream of divine blessings must flow without intermission to other people."⁵ It is the dynamic character of the world for Thomas Aquinas in which one perfects oneself in imitation of the self-diffusing goodness of God by perfecting others. It is the love of paradise that is the counter to the seven deadly sins as Dante presents them—sins of pride and of envy in particular in which one holds what one has against one's needy neighbor or begrudges them what they have of the good out of anxious self-concern.

This is a fullness of giving without gradual depletion or loss like that of the sun, one of the most common images for God in the Christian tradition, the sun that remains resplendent however much it illuminates others, and that only gets the brighter as the light it reflects onto everything else is reflected back onto it. Rather than being achieved at the expense of others or given out at one's own expense, here light feeds light, joy feeds joy, delight feeds delight. Dante again: "The infinite and inexpressible Grace . . . gives itself to Love as a sunbeam gives itself to a bright surface. As much light as it finds there, it bestows; thus as the blaze of Love is spread more widely, the greater the Eternal Glory grows. As mirror reflects mirror, so above, the more there are who join their souls, the more Love learns perfection, and the more they love."⁶

On this vision of things the whole of God's goodness is distributed to each, in the way that, as Plotinus that non-Christian so dear to many in the early church says, the soul is present entire to every part of the body, or the whole vital principle of a tree, and not merely some portion of it, is to be found in each leaf. Without a speck of jealousy or pride in its own possession, God is always offering the whole of the good to everyone, limited only by our capacities to receive, limitations that may be the product of natural forms of finitude or of a divinely arranged diversity of roles in church or society, but are more likely the result of our own sinful institution of contrary, competitive economies. Wherever possible those who are offered the whole of the good by God are to pass on what they receive in that same fashion—with the demand for equality of distribution.

Even natural limitations that account for diversity in the reception of the whole good offered are subject to indefinite expansion via the workings of grace—something that Origen and Gregory of Nyssa in the early church, for example, affirm quite strongly (at least for people, in Gregory's case). All things in the world whatever their differences in kind might be elevated to the level of the highest good. For example, in a communion or union with God's own goodness that would make that goodness one's own without loss of one's own particular nature. Inequalities that remain, among creatures who retain the particularities of their identities, are, ideally, not a matter of rank but a matter simply of a diversity of genuine goods.

As my high-flown rhetoric at points might itself suggest, it is easy to think of this noncompetitive economy as a pipe dream, deferred until the utopian space of heaven. The references to Platonism don't help, suggesting that this noncompetitive economy can be instituted only for spiritual goods, in a realm of grace divorced from the material world, from the everyday fields of economics and politics. Only joy or knowledge is subject to noncompetitive distribution—nothing that is physically embodied. This sort of Platonic dualism is often of course incorporated into Christianity along with the ideals of a non-competitive economy. Hear the words of H. Richard Niebuhr as late as 1929: "The values to which [the modern world] gives the greatest veneration and which it pursues with greatest abandon are values which inherently lead to strife and conflict. They are political and economic goods which cannot be shared without diminution and which arouse cupidity and strife rather than lead to cooperation and peace."⁷

But, pace Niebuhr, the Christian tradition, at least this submerged aspect of the tradition, affirms at a minimum that God creates the whole world, in all its aspects—material and spiritual—according to such a noncompetitive economy, so that it should be such a noncompetitive economy to every degree possible; and holds us as creatures of body and soul up to its measure. The social worlds of economics and politics as we find them certainly do not run according to principles of a noncompetitive economy, but as modern people we are aware of their malleability by our own efforts, the way such structures are maintained only by way of our own complicity in them. By setting Christian ideas of the production and circulation of goods into a comparative economy, by making that comparative framing an economic one, my intent is just to suggest that a Christian economy has everything to do with the material dimensions of life—with the economic more narrowly construed.

Set within a comparative economy, it's clear that grace has everything to do with money. By avoiding all forms of reductionism in that economic framing of the comparison, I'm trying to allow grace its distinctive voice. Grace has everything to do with money because in grace money finds its greatest challenger and most obstreperous critic.

2. Social Sources of Denominationalism (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 28.

3. Phaedrus, 248 a–b; 252c–253c, trans. R. Hackforth, in the Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).

5. Luther, WA 10, 1, 1, trans. in Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 735n 1.

6. Purgatorio, Canto 15, lines 67–75, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Mentor, 1957).

Harvard Divinity School