2.5 A Model of Economic Liberty
2.5.3 The End of Eschatology
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And now we come to the end of communion. Knowledge, itself an economic function, emerges from and supports the interests of the Same. The question of knowledge cannot be isolated from the question of communion. Economic knowledge, emerging from a rationalism that is unique, subverts all communion.
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eschatology that will vindicate the community while casting down all Others. It is an eschatology that precedes from the linear sequence of progressive secular time, a time without transcendence for a world without transcendence.
With no transcendent eschatology, it is ordinary life and ordinary time that must be sanctified. The telos of the economic is always domination – the domination of space and time.
The future must be brought about through the work and intention of those who control the present. Eschatology collapses, therefore, into the labors of history such that the future ceases to surprise us in any meaningful way. When this happens, ordinary life becomes the “site for the highest forms of Christian life,” which amounts to a Christianity consumed with disciplined personal advancement.116 The sanctification of the ordinary, which can be traced back at least to the work of Martin Luther, amounts in later modernity to the secularization of eschatology, the collapse of the eschaton into history and ordinary time.117
Taylor claims that the ‘affirmation’ of ordinary life is one of the dimensions of the economic form of modern life. Relations and relationships are requisite for that economic
form.118 Consider again Beauvoir’s notion that our individual choices are conferring value on the things we choose and, in some sense, making a choice for all humanity.119 It is through human relations that economic value is conferred and negotiated. Of course, then, family life and close
116 Taylor, Imaginaries, 74.
117 A variety of movements in Luther’s theology collectively amount to a sanctification of the ordinary. Luther re- imagines the communion sanctorum not as a heavenly communion but as an earthly one. Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, Robert C. Schultz, trans. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966): 298. The three estates or hierarchies of the priestly office, marriage, and politics are set on equal footing, with none given prominence (Lohse, Luther’s Theology, 246).
118 Taylor, Imaginaries, 74.
119 Beauvoir, Ethics, 69.
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ordinary relationships are going to emerge as deeply important and meaningful. In many ways, they become the form of modern society. In that case and from that perspective, to threaten this normal and normative form of society is to threaten the integrity, vitality, and goodness of society itself. The flourishing of individuals, the family, and other close relationships are the telos, the goal, and the purpose of modern society, a society without a transcendent
eschatology.120
Without either a transcendent teleology or an apocalyptic eschatology, what guides society are the impersonal forces and processes “happening behind the backs of agents” whose invisible hands demonstrate “law-like systematicity.”121 Bourdieu speaks here of the transferable logic of the habitus,122 but it amounts to this same economic or statistical form of society – a society “unhooked from ‘polity.’”123 The telos of humanity is statistical regularity, a telos found not in God or the gods, found not in nature or mystery, found not even in symbolic logic, but rather in the indubitable clarity and rationality of spreadsheets. Our future and the Good itself is secured through SPSS.124
120 Of course, it would not be hard to imagine another form of society within a modern, economic model. We could, for instance, imagine a society composed of radically free individuals without regulated and regulative relations – a society without marriages or traditional nuclear or extended families. A society with flexible relationships and relational structures where marriages, if one chooses them, might be open or might be broadened beyond two persons or gender-agnostic. This society and these relations would, perhaps, more perfectly express the radical liberty of the economic model. There may be a dissolution of society as a collective action in this form. In this form, does anything necessitate collective action and obligation?
121 Taylor, Imaginaries, 79.
122 Bourdieu, Distinction, 170.
123 Taylor, Imaginaries, 79.
124 SPSS, or the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, is a statistical analysis software developed by IBM and used widely by researchers.
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For decades, prophetic theologians have been protesting capitalism to little avail. Gustavo Gutierrez, Theodore Jennings, Douglas Meeks, Jeorg Rieger, Susan Thisthlethwait, and many other distinguished scholars have been voices in the wilderness since roughly the 1970s.
Centuries before, the voices of Basil the Great, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, and others warned of the dangers of riches and wealth.125 Based on statistical word counts, Jesus spoke more about money than any other topic in the New Testament. He too warned us of this danger. Why have most churches and broader society ignored or attacked these prophets? They spoke of the gospel, the call of Jesus, the Church and its sacraments, and the rights and dignity of people made in God’s image. These theological critiques of wealth, capitalism, and oppression continue to appeal to individual life, liberty, and sustenance – the very values upon which Locke established classical liberalism and the very values adopted by his friend, Adam Smith. Liberalism is quite capable of justifying colonialism and imperialism precisely through the language of rights and dignity. Consequently, theological critiques have found little purchase within many communities and churches. Can we overcome the great structural and systemic evils of modern life by appeal to human rights and dignity? Can we do so by appealing to something transcendent and
apocalyptically eschatological? If modern society begins with the origin story of equality and equity, then any inequality today is a result of one’s choices rather than the system itself.
Individuals that fail to work within the system are the problem, not the system itself. These are the responses of liberal capitalism. In terms of our churches, is there a more liberal organization on the planet than what we find in Evangelical churches with their message of discipline, personal responsibility, personal moral accomplishment, and one’s work ethic?
125 See Charles Avila, Ownership: Early Christian Teaching (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1983).
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Liberalism and economy will, however, never explain martyrdom. They will never give us one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. They will breed anguish, anxiety, and despair. And churches in this model will call forth secularism, agnosticism, and atheism. After all, they offer nothing more, nothing transcendent, and nothing apocalyptically eschatological.