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Economy and Covenant

1. Economy and Crisis

2. Man in Covenant
3. Discipleship and Independence
4. Together
5. Marriage and Singleness
6. Two Societies
7. The Future of Man

1. Economy and Crisis

Economics tells us about the economy. What is an economy?

Oikonomia - Oikos and nomos

There are perhaps two general senses in which we use the word and two
definitions these give us vie for supremacy. In one, ‘economy’ means
‘provision’, the ordering and distribution of resources. The word itself,
oikonomia, comes from ‘oikos’, house or household, and ‘nomos’, order or
rule. Each household has its own order and form of self-regulation. Each
household has its own particular way of doing things, and its own rules
that maintain that way, in order to give the optimal form of provision.
Resources are distributed to its members for their various purposes in
order to serve the purpose of the household as a whole. Oikonomia
therefore refers to the way a household organises itself.

A household may extend to an estate that provides all its own resources,
involving agriculture and workshops, and so has no need to go outside
and resort to trade to support itself. It is so whether the household is an
entire city-state or nation. The long and distinguished concept of political
economy relates to the way that this city or society regulates itself, is
structured and ruled, and in which it produces or procures what it needs.
The head of household husbands the resources of his household, so a
husband (‘house-bond’) is an economiser or economist. Every century of
European history has produced manuals setting out the task of managing
the resources of an estate. The best known of these is Xenophon’s
‘Oikonomos’, which we could translate as ‘The Steward’ or ‘The task of
Stewardship’, or even simply ‘Management’. These manuals merge into
the political literature that describes the role of the statesman, in which
Xenophon’s better known Athenian contemporaries Plato and Aristotle are
the masters.

An economy is about good use of resources. It is the way we organise our

interactions and relationships. Then it is the particular arrangement that
has arisen in each particular place. Over time matters may even seem to
arrange themselves so we experience a level of impromptu self-
organisation in our affairs.

In the other sense, ‘economic’ means frugal, sparing, economical.

Economics on this definition starts from the premise of the limits, and
therefore the scarcity, of our resources. Given that everything is scarce, a

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gain here must be a loss there, so use of resources then points to a
minimal and tightly calculated use. This definition, in which scarcity is the
deciding factor, and we therefore calculate which changes would make
things better for some without making them worse for others, dominates
modern economics.

In this book I am going to contrast the whole-tradition of economics with

‘modern economics’, and so to contrast the human economy with the
market or financial economy. This is to make a contrast between the
whole and an aspect of that whole On the one hand we have whole-
tradition economics and on the other, modern economics. Modern
economics is a part or an aspect of whole-tradition economics. So we can
contrast the full version with this – modern – abridgement of it. But
though it is a part, modern economics believes that it has superseded all
alternatives and so assumes that it is the whole.

In this book I will use the word ‘modern’ to name a particular aspect or
mode of self-organisation. The roots of the word connect ‘modern’ to
‘mode’ and what is ‘in mode’. It has to do with what is in favour and is
current fashion. By ‘modern’ I don't simply mean present rather than
past, or contemporary and up-to-date rather than old-fashioned. This is
not a contrast between present and past. it is a contrast between a long-
term view, that acknowledges previous generations as well as our own,
with a view that considers only the present and which is circumscribed to
our immediate concerns. A long-term view looks a long way forward as
well as back, and reckons that an acquaintance with the past gives you
the conceptual flexibility that prepares us for the future. Modern
economics assumes that we have nothing to learn from previous
generations, and is therefore history-resistant, even history-phobic. It is
the argument of this book that we are short-changed when we accept an
account of ourselves that comes without any accounting for how we got
here and doesn't care to say what decisions it has made along the way
about what is important. Our identity is inseparable from our history. A
minimal and reductive view of our history gives an inflexible
understanding of ourselves, which doesn't make it easy to make sense of
the changes around us. Modern economics withholds essential
complexities of our identity and with it the resources by which we can
adapt.

We are going to examine the economy in a number of ways at once. We

will consider our own personal course through life, along with recent
economic events, and we will consider the relationships between some
central economic concepts – labour, demand, markets, use or utility,
value, money, credit and debt, and the concepts particular to ‘modern
economics’ (classical and neo-classical), rationality, marginal preference
and utility, and indicate the history of some of these concepts.

Modern economics tells us a particular version of our own human identity,

but it is a very thin account of our identity. Too much conceptual frugality
gets us into trouble. It conceives of the individual human being who is
consistently rational and knows his own best interests. He is in command
of himself and, law apart, need accept no constraints on his will beyond

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the equal will (‘preferences’) of all other actors as these are fairly
expressed by prices in the marketplace.

The modern economic view of the world encourages us to believe that

each of us is entirely able to make the right choices all time. Except
perhaps the government, no one is able to know better than we what are
individuals interests are. He is free to act on his interests in the
marketplace. The result of this view of man who is fully in charge, is
cognitive dissonance, for as individuals we find that we are not fully in
charge. The man described or assumed by modern economics is a divided
and double figure: entirely master of himself, and the helpless wage-slave
of the corporation that employs him, or worse, which can dispense with
him entirely, leaving him without employment or dignity. This conception
of the rational economic agent belongs the belief that he can know how
best to act. Prices will always reliably give him all the information he
needs, for markets reflect all available information about all preferences.
Markets are efficient: they cannot be wrong, at least not over the long-
term, for the same reason that each say that not everybody can be
wrong.

But all these basic tenets are also up for question. Do we know what our
best interests are? Avner Offer believes that ‘what people end up
choosing cannot be taken as a proper measure of their welfare. Choice is
fallible.’1 Do we know what we want? George Ainslie believes that each of
us is a stream of wants, and that we cannot say that we know when any
particular want within this stream should be promoted to become ‘the
want’ that we are going to hold out for. And our future self is pitched
against our present self, and more often than not, our present self wins.2

The modern economic concept of the rational economic actor encourage

each of us to see ourselves as a little emperor, with the result is that each
of us has to live in a world filled with emperors who do not like to be
challenged or reasoned with. But perhaps we would have a more robust
view of the economic agent if we conceded that they do not just interact
through the market and the mechanism of prices, but can also challenge
one another, in speech and in public, and so understood them as not just
economic but also as political beings? I will suggest that we may recover
a more rounded view of the economic agent and the world he lives in if we
re-avail ourselves of the bigger, whole-tradition, version of economics
together with its more complex understanding of human beings.

We will ask whether the economy is undergoing a crisis, whether it is

regularly in crisis, and whether this is a bad thing. We will ask whether, if
crisis a obliges us to re-assess ourselves, it may be a good thing. We will
ask whether we are facing an unprecedented crisis. On the other hand, we
1
Avner Offer The Challenge of Affluence p.358
2
George Ainslie Breakdown of Will p. 130 ‘In an intertemporal bargaining model,
will is a recursive process… the person herself can't be absolutely sure of what
she’ll do in the future and makes her present choice based on her best prediction.
But this choice also affects her prediction, so that before she has acted on her
choice she may predict again, and may then change her previous prediction and
thus her choice.

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might find that we resort to the idea of a crisis too often; the assumption
that there are no precedents for our current circumstances is one of those
deep beliefs that I shall lump together as ‘modern’. We should be sceptical
of the view that the time which we now experience is like no other.

Which of these concepts, provision or scarcity, is going to be our starting

point? For modern economics, scarcity is the starting point, because the
world is finite. But we are going to adopt both. We must examine the
effect of the finiteness and so the limitedness of our goods and resources.
If resources are limited we have limited options and must choose between
them, and so we must exercise our judgment. And we are going to say
that the economy is also unlimited, for we can love and be free without
limit. There are no limits to our moral possibilities. There is no limit to
ingenuity, so we can find new ways of doing things; we can hope to make
the technological breakthroughs that will give us new sources of energy.
So, unlike neoclassical economics, we will assume that the world is limited
in some ways but not in others, so scarcity cannot be our sole
fundamental principle.

What belongs to the whole or human economy is not contained exclusively

in the ‘economy’. The very term ‘economy’ may be too neat and
convenient, a ‘reification’. The economy is, after all, just the way of our
interactions appear from a certain angle.3

Economics and the pragmatic

Economics is the language in which we conduct our pragmatic decisions
about our interactions with everybody except those closest to us, in those
interactions that we call ‘transactions’. Economics considers person-person
encounter in isolation from their effect on society as a whole and so over
the short-term. It is a limited explanation that relies on a conceptual
frugality. It means that we do not have to spell out our respective
intentions from the relationship each time we encounter someone. in full
does not require , since it considers each interaction apart from its place
in time-scale or history. You can study economics without having to read
any history, even economic history. Economics is about pragmatic and
short-term considerations. What is economics economical with? It is
economical of all human explanations. What has been economised out of
the human economy? The human, that’s what. Dennis Robertson asked
the acute and wonderful question: ‘What does the economist economize?
Quoting Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, he came up with best
answer: ‘Tis love, ‘tis love... that scarce resource, love.’ 4

3
Oliver O'Donovan Ways of Judgment p. 64 ‘Conceptually, the problem lies with the
reification of ‘the economy’… The economy is…simply the way our various endeavours and
engagements appear when observed at a certain cross-section, the point at which
transactions occur in markets. The meaning of these transaction is not to be found the
market through which they pass, but in the forms of life that generate them.’
4
Dennis H. Robertson “What Does the Economist Economize?” (pp. 147-154 in
Economic Commentaries (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1956), p. 148. ‘But if
we economists mind our own business, and do that business well, we can, I believe,
contribute mightly to the economizing, that is to the full and thrifty utilization, of
that scarce resource Love – which we know, just as well as anybody else, to be the
most precious thing in the world.’

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Economics treats the whole field of human interaction as though it were
not about humans, or as though humans were not complex and self-aware
creatures, but just simple ones. It talks about human interaction by
simplifying. For much of time this is enlightening and useful. But
economics is a simplified theory of human interaction, not the whole
account, and the simplified theory needs to be in regular dialogue with all
the other accounts, in which humans are complicated and self-reflexive. If
it drifts out of touch with other sciences, this simplified theory ceases to
be a theory and becomes an ideology. It tells us that we are simple and
ought to become more simple than we are; it turns from a description to a
prescription.

Economics is premised on the assumption that its view of man works on

the short-term and we need no more. I suggest that we need to maintain
a proper proportion between our short-term and our medium- and long-
terms. Economics cannot substitute for political judgment, the short-term
vocabulary cannot replace the long-term vocabulary. The long-term
vocabulary is about the future as much as it is about the past, and the
immediate concerns of our present economy only make sense as long as
there is a future. We may take permission from our past, and so from our
culture, to carve out a future for ourselves, so that our economy will
continue beyond this present.

Together with politics, the discipline of economics enables us to act well.

Acting well means acting in our own interests, so that we stay alive and
flourish, and for one another and so for the common good. We cannot act
well without acting within the ‘mechanisms’ of economic and public life,
within the rule of law, and within the tradition of political life as this is now
represented by economics.5 We can only act well when we act within a
large area of agreement about property and contract, and this means in
the framework given by law and its enforcement. We cannot act well for
one another if we attempt to do so in complete ignorance or defiance of
the expectations and traditions built up by generations of acting well –
economically. These are the traditions which we know as economics.
Economics enables us to live well, but it is does not do this for us.

Economics is a technical discourse with its own vocabulary and discipline.

Economists, rightly, want to see the good disciplines of their science
respected. But to point out those features of the economy neglected by
economists in the modern period we will need to travel beyond the idiom
of modern economics.

It is one generally-agreed characteristic of economics that it has no strong

sense of its own history. It not only quickly forgets how earlier
generations of economists conceived of the issues that puzzle us today,
but it is part of its credo that the discipline of economics began little more
than two hundred years ago, and that no one was an economist in a
scientific sense before that. 6

5
Benedict XVI on economics and morality, and encyclical
6
Geoffrey Hodgson How Economics Forgot History (Routledge 2001).

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If the Humanities are the disciplines that discuss what it is to be human,
and economics is one of these, economics is a series of abbreviations of
how humans act together. It is the conceptuality that enables us to talk
about what human beings do in the mass, in great numbers. But this
series of abbreviations are meaningful when they are continually renewed
and controlled by the full discourse in which we talk about what humans
do and are together.

As the Humanities, theology chief among them, remind us, what we want
is not finally this or that thing. What we want is a person. We want these
persons to love us, and so we want their recognition, acknowledgement
and esteem in a relationship that will not end. A thing can only be a
means, while persons are ends.

Persons are the ends and goals of all our action. We want people to
respond to us and give us their affirmation. The affirmation we receive
from them gives us the permission we need to go on to new encounters.
We give and receive honour and esteem, approval and permission, and we
give it by exchanging accounts of how the world is. Economics is about
this means rather than about this end, but all our discussion of means
should finally be transparent to this end. The goal of economics is
therefore not to be found within economics itself, but in the wider
humanities in which we talk about persons and about what is good and
true. As long as we imagine that economics tells us about ends, and that
it makes all other human discourses redundant we are relying on an
understanding that is impoverishing, reducing the levels of trust on which
a buoyant economy relies.

We have to construct our case slowly. We will do so first by showing that

as an economic agent, man has an agency because he has freedom to act
and reason to act. He acts because he has a motive to do so.

Economic Crisis?
Let us say that our economy is in crisis. You may or may not feel the truth
of this when you are reading this. Perhaps it has no direct impact on you.
Other people are becoming employed, but then perhaps that is because
some industries are declining while, we hope, other industries are growing
and creating new employment. But a crisis may not be an entirely bad
thing, at least, if particular events help us notice long-term changes. We
may regard the present economic crisis as an opportunity to correct our
course and renew ourselves. This book is going to offer you some reasons
why we might see our economic crisis as an opportunity to rise to the
challenge and become stronger for doing so. This depends on whether we
recognise that this economic crisis is really a challenge to us, which we
have to respond to as persons.

An economy is just the outcome of all the many things that we do and
that all other people do. It is not same vast mechanism that goes on
regardless of what we do. The movement of prices tell us what things we
regard as important to us and when prices and salaries and interest rates
move suddenly, we have an opportunity to re-assess what truly is
important. Particular economic crises can oblige us to ask what is truly

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important. The economy is the sum of all we create when we work, and it
is the judgment of that sum by others. There is no deeper mechanism
involved than that. To talk about economics is therefore to talk about
ourselves in the light of the value that other people, in other countries,
place on what we do. The economy is about how other people estimate us
and thus how plausible our account of ourselves is.

One reason that our economy is crisis may be that we have not worked
very hard over the last fifty years. We have turned up at the office and
put in the hours at our desk, but the work that we have done may not be
as valuable as we have been claiming. We have enjoyed a huge growth,
and can point to great advances in standard of living and life expectancy.
But could it be that we have also experienced some losses, and not
registered that this is what they are? There has been a huge growth of
wealth, as we measure it in financial terms, but it may be that there been
an equivalent decline in our capabilities and social cohesion that may
impact on the economy in the future.

The performance of the last fifty years may not be a good guide to the
performance of the next fifty. If the next fifty are more difficult than the
last it might suggest that we have not made sufficient provision for the
more difficult period ahead, and so indicate that the last fifty years have
not been as successful as we thought.

There has been a large rise in prosperity over the last fifty years. How
much of this is the result of our own work, and how much is simply the
carry-over from the work of preceding generations? Have we been borne
along by the momentum generated by them? Perhaps an economy can
cruise forward for a long time, each generation adding less and less to
that momentum, before it slows enough to be regarded as a crisis. How
much of a time-lag (‘hysteresis’) operates at the deeper levels of the
economy? Could it be that we are at a deep level still living off the energy
invested several generations ago? We need to consider whether what I
shall call ‘social capital’ is the motor of such momentum.

What is social capital? Social capital is a combination of how well we all

get on together and the skills we have (also called human capital). It is a
matter of the level of trust and confidence which makes it easy for us to
approach other people; this is as simple, but difficult to measure, as the
degree of optimism or pessimism of different age-groups in a society,
reflecting their belief in their own prospects. The disappearance of class
barriers which makes it possible for anyone to approach anyone else, is a
rise in social capital. But perhaps we also have fewer relationships with
people outside our own age groups, so there is less communication about
the stages of life and the transmission of the skills that those stages
require, so that there is less communication about starting a family and
holding it together through the tough early years. If fewer people live
close to their parents, so grandparents and children have no strong
relationships, and fewer people know their neighbours well enough to rely
on them, we might register this as a decline in social capital. We receive
more education than we did fifty years ago, nevertheless fewer of us have
any idea how to mend a puncture, build a chicken shed or cook a meal

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now than fifty years ago. But how much more, or less, confident do we
feel in approaching a neighbour to help us out with any of these tasks?
These intangibles are difficult to measure, but they have an economic
impact nonetheless. The economic indicators – GDP – so not tell us
everything we need to know. An economy is not simply the wealth
presently expressed in bank balances or the short-term changes to wealth
expressed by prices. These tell us, we hope, how things stand in this
present instant, but this information is meaningful only as it indicates how
things are going. However difficult it is to measure, we should regard
social capital as a deep kind of forward investment.

The crisis in the economy may be the moment to correct ourselves and
adopt a wider view with greater understanding of the element of ‘social
capital’ in our national wealth. The original meaning of the word ‘crisis’ is
‘judgment’. An economic crisis may be an opportunity for us to revise our
judgment of ourselves and come up with a new assessment. Other people
are able to judge us. We cannot oblige them buy our goods and services
at the prices we want. If the emerging economies in Asia decide that we
Westerners have over-valued ourselves, we cannot deny that they may do
so. They may sell the stock they have held in our economy and take their
capital elsewhere. They are free to decide that the value of our economies
is not as high as we British and Americans have claimed.

It is no mechanism or natural forces, but the judgment of other people,

that determines our value. We are all actors in the public marketplace,
whose worth is decided by other people, through the mediation of the
price system. Since international trade has been conducted in the US
dollar, every nation has been content to hold dollars, and the UK has
shared in the prosperity which other nations have associated with
American market and its financial markets in particular. These nations
were able to do this because we gave them the power to do by importing
their goods. Now they may not be so willing to buy our financial stock. We
put this power into their hands, and after a long time and gently, they
have begun to use it. We have been taken down a peg and this has come
as a nasty surprise.

Economics starts with the question of judgment. If our latest economic

crisis comes as a surprise it may be because we have forgotten that other
people have a right to judge us, and to decide what we are worth. It is
time to re-assess the long-term worth of our economy, and this means to
judge our own worth, and our ability to be good judges of ourselves.

All this suggests that we have allowed ourselves to become vulnerable.

How is this? We have been under a spell, believing that our own market
price will always go up, but quite unprepared for when someone sells and
our stock goes down. But it is not simply other nations with newly
dynamic economies who have lowered their estimation of us. We have
robbed ourselves. There has been a massive re-distribution of wealth,
upwards, creating a small class of the super-wealthy, but for many people
there has been a loss of wealth.

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We have a view of ourselves that is on the one hand too pessimistic. Our
view of human being is reductive and un-ambitious. And on the other
hand our view of ourselves is wildly over-optimistic; we have assumed
that that it would be possible for us to ride a rising wave of prosperity that
would conduct up towards ever-greater standard of living. If it is too not
big enough, our view of human nature may have this effect, and because
our view of ourselves, and of the value of what we produce, is out of
kilter. Perhaps this is because we have not regarded the unity and
integrity of the national economy, and so the active participation of all
citizens in it, to be a central economic good.

Neoclassical economics does not help us to see that it is other people who
judge the value of our work and thus our national economic product. It
persuades us to think about ourselves not as public but fundamentally as
private being, individuals who operate in isolation from one another, and
in isolation from other societies. This makes it difficult for us to
understand what other countries make of us. It makes it even more
difficult for us to imagine how future generations of our own society will
consider us.

2. Man in Covenant
The social and individual creature
Western culture gives us a vast range of accounts of man. These are
examined in universities by that group of disciplines termed ‘the
Humanities’. Modern economics derives from the Western intellectual
tradition, which itself derives from a long dialogue between the Christian
faith and the surrounding culture.

The Christian faith gives a complex account of man. He is a social being

and an individual one. Christianity describes man’s freedom to encounter
and act with his fellow man. He is not himself without other people. He is
an individual, but he is also a person, made up by his many relationships.
He has to seek other persons, and he does so in what we might call the
public square.

Christianity suggests that there cannot be a such a thing as a

comprehensive economic theory, for very concept of ‘theory’ suggests
that too much is sown up. Man cannot be utterly known, for his future is
open and there is everything to play for. So Christianity suggests that
modern economics describes man is reductive terms. The Christian
account does not concede that everyone is primarily an employee and
consumer, for whom relationship with every other individual is mediated
through the market and global economy and the price system. It suggests
that there is an ongoing intellectual crisis for economics, and a crisis for
any society that allows modern economics to provide its primary account
of human relationships.

In the Christian account man is an economic agent of a very particular

sort. Christians insist that each human being is a giver. It is good to give,
and good to receive as a gift what others provide, for what we finally give
and receive is ourselves. No one wishes to be alone. Each of us loves and
seeks love, respects other people and hopes for their respect. We go down

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to the public square to be with our fellow human beings, to seek their
recognition and give our approval to them. As one economist readily
acknowledges: ‘Our well-being depends on receiving acknowledgement,
attention and approbation, on affirmation, confirmations, and gifts.’7

The market place is simply the public square, place where everybody
meets. This is not limited to any particular place, but is every place
outside the household where people meet. So, according to the Christian
faith, man goes down to market place not merely because he has to, to
buy and sell in order to satisfy his material needs, but because he wants
to. He is not merely a hungry and materially needy individual, but he
seeks other people just because they are good. Man is never a merely
economic being but also a political one.

Christians point towards an alternative way of life, and so towards an

alternative ‘economy’. The people of God are the household of God, and
that household has its own order and form of self-regulation (oikonomia).
Christians suggest that an economy is healthy when rises out of a healthy
culture. The global economy has arisen from the culture of Western
Europe, and the culture of Europe has itself arisen from long interaction
with the Christian faith. This faith produces a culture, our accumulated
deliberation on the action and freedom of man.

The Christian faith gives the dignity of the individual and, by extension, of
his property and the rule of law and so of contract. The Christian faith has
lent this to Western culture, which has given rise to national and
international markets and the global economy. Christian economics rests
on the responsibility of the individual, who is motivated to look after his
own family, on the rule of law (and thus fair exchange and property
rights). But Christian economics also knows that the economy is not a
self-righting mechanism; governments have to hold the ring and
sometimes have to step in order to safeguard the ability of all members of
that nation to play their part in the economy and national life. Any
Christian account of economics will refer to what Christians call debt
cancellation or debt forgiveness, and to the regulations to control
speculation (usury) and to the Sabbath and Jubilee laws that correct the
effects of excessive disparities of economic opportunity. These are
principles must be embodied in laws and protected by specific
interventions by governments. How they are so embodied and protected
will be different at different times and places.

In the Christian account man is a judge, and can aspire to true self-
judgment. We have to examine the concept of judgment, as we do
freedom, love and self-giving, not because these are religious ideas, but
because they are fundamental economic concepts. As long as we attempt
to understand economics without them, we achieve incoherence. These
concepts indicate our freedom: the concept of gift indicates that we are
free to give, and give ourselves. They indicate that we are mature and
self-possessed agents, each of whom is answerable for him or herself, and

7
Offer The Challenge of Affluence p.358

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that we are persons, in relationship with one another, social beings who
participate in one another’s lives and contribute something to one
another’s identities. We are individual persons, independent of one
another, who live together in interdependence. The Christian account
holds these two emphases together.

The fundamental freedom of man to give himself to his fellow man is the
beginning of all human interaction and the basis of every economy. You
may meet this person and exchange with him words, ideas and accounts
of the world, and who may exchange services and a whole world of
commodities in what we call economic transactions. When we call the
market ‘free’ we mean that anyone may speak, persuade and sell to or
buy from anyone else, without hindrance. On this basis the market is good
because it is simply the freedom of man to be with man.

Each human may be known only in love and freedom. Since we have to
learn how to judge and value one another truly, this takes time and
patience. Each human being flourishes as he knows he is loved, and by
love is enabled to love and give himself in service. All communities and
societies are entities of love. Any society may affirm that love and
freedom, and thus also patience, is required for knowledge of any
individual person. Loves aspires to permanence: we desire its growth, not
its break down; love aspire to greater self-control, so that it becomes
truer and more permanent.

The Christian account says that God is with man. In the covenant that
God extends to him, each man is given to his fellows and set before them
for their judgment and approval. He is not first an autonomous individual
and then a social being. Man is simultaneously a covenanted and coupled
being as well as a single and singular being. We are not alone, self-
enclosed monads. We always act before others and so are in company.
Persons are ultimate. As other persons are valuable, their opinion of us is
valuable too; it is good for us to hear it and receive their correction. It is
good for us to appear in the public square and commit ourselves to the
assessment of the market.

By baptism and discipleship Christians may learn the skills of self-

judgment by which our autonomy as persons may be established. We may
make appear before our fellows and before God to make our confession,
repent and ask for their forgiveness. To be able to repent is the basis of
true freedom, for if we can repent and change our way we are not trapped
on our present course. Any society benefits from the presence of the
community that can hear the truth, repent and speak in critical self-
judgment. Such a society is not trapped by its resentment in a circle of
mutual accusation and retribution, in which blame can only ever be given
but fault never admitted.

The presence of a high view of man, which is what Christians bring to any
society, represents a gift of the hope of freedom. The society that does
not acknowledge that every human is loved and all society is sustained by
God, will suffer crises, which manifest themselves in political or economic
forms. But where there is the possibility of self-judgment and the means

11
of finding and greater self-knowledge, that society can hope to grow
through such crises and emerge stronger for them. The Christian
contribution is to show that the various crises we identify, are caused by
an impoverished account of our identity, by which we are unable to
receive the judgment of our peers and learn from it.

Embodied persons
We are embodied persons, available to one another through the medium
of materiality that creation affords us. The Church proposes the two
doctrines of creation and redemption, which tells us that the world is
created and given to us by God as gift, and as the medium of our mutual
love in freedom for humankind. It is good both in its thereness, and
because it puts us in a social and political world made up of other people
who expect good things of us. The world is a gift, from God to man, one
person to another, so that it may be the source of endless gift from one
man to another and thus the beginning and condition of a relationship that
will continue without limit.

We have to give two accounts of our place in the world. One tells us about
nature. The world is a heavy and unyielding place, given and non-
negotiable. We are confronted by its brute materiality, and our every
encounter reflects its finitude; there is scarcity, competition and the
hardness of work. By our hard work we accumulate the material means of
life, by arranging the creatures of the world into nearer or more distant
relationship to ourselves, exchanging he less for the more valuable and so
ordering and re-ordering the world. The ontology of nature helps us to
talk about man by talking about his embodiment, and his situation in a
given and finite world. It helps us to count persons and so to talk about
man in terms of groups and crowds, and therefore of quantity and
number. The material world is the medium of our every encounter.

But the Christian account refers to creation rather than to nature. It says
that created persons are embodied persons. The concept of body is
fundamental; all nature is caught up in human interaction. We are
available to one another only because we are embodied persons, for it is
only our bodies that allow us to see and hear and find one another, and
this is so even when we are not in one location by enabled to
communicate through other media, books or electronic means.

We must say why we have bodies, that is, why we need them. This may
appear to need to be beyond explanation. Bodies have purposes. Pre-
modern people knew this, but early political philosophy dispensed with
this knowledge and refused to countenance that bodies are anything but
things, inert and dumb. The result is that there is something that need
explaining right in the middle of economics, and which, since we don't
explain it, creates contradictions and tensions with far-reaching
consequences. A body is not just a thing. It is the way in which we can be
together, and so be social, public and political beings. Since we are
embodied persons, bodies are inseparable from persons, who are
themselves inseparable from purposes and aspirations. The materiality of
the world is caught up in our inter-personal relating: as we give one
another the material means by which we can become present to one

12
another. Creation is the good gift of God to us, and it is for us to be its
stewards, to order and re-order it. The Christian faith holds these two
accounts together; it regards nature as a matter of creation, and tells us
that the identity of nothing is yet established, before the eschaton, and
that like ourselves, creation will be redeemed.

The Church regards all forms of mediation, mutual acknowledgement and

payment as the gift and hospitality of previous generations to us. They
are good for us if we are able to receive them so. The Christian regards all
persons as good, and regards the life in which we discover the goodness
of each person, as itself good. Nothing finally is what it is until each
person has in freedom named it so. All of us must seek the approval and
recognition of all other persons, and thus in which the personhood of each
of us is dependent on the personhood of us all. The depth and mystery of
man is both present and future, waits to be revealed, and that it is not
entirely amenable to calculation and cannot yet be finally accounted for.
Though we find ourselves in relationships, and are embarked on life with
one another, we cannot decide that we have finished with one another. All
relationships and human history, and within it, the history of the material
world, remain open.

What we are given

When talking about economics, Christians have to say that there are two
economies. There is the world, and there within the world is the Church.
There is the world of buying and selling, in which each item exchanged is
instantly recognised and reciprocated by an exchange of money. And
there is another economy in which all is given, and each is able to give
unconcerned by what they receive in return. This economy of the Church
is the economy of interpersonal love: each has received love, and knows
themselves to be so secured by that love that they are able to love and
give without limit without anxiety about. We have received our reward,
massively and in advance. Christians understand that the more
fundamental economy of God, which provides us with this love, enables us
to give ourselves to every person in every transaction. The gift of God is
the basis of all inter-personal acknowledgement and encounter. The
Christian economy of the Church is a ‘system’ of gift and self-giving, and
of waiting to receive whatever aspect of themselves others offer us.
‘An economy of gratitude is a vital, nearly sacred, nearly bottom-most,
large implicit layer of an intimate bond. It is the summary of all felt
gifts.’ [Arlie Russell Hochschild The Commercialization of Intimate Life
(Berkeley University Of California 2003) p.105]
This economy of love, which we receive love from God, and the security
that it gives us to give and love, that powers our contribution to the
world, and to that other economy in which we all buy and sell. The
Christian understanding that we have received all things from God – grace
– subtly contributes to the secular economy that has no awareness of
such grace.

The Christian economy, the discipled life in the Church, is denominated by

the identity and name of Jesus. Through him we may acknowledge one
another’s true identity and pay one another our proper dignity. The
Church has a payments system, and it is itself a payment system,

13
denominated by this name. Indeed the Church is the original system of
payment, because it refers to the original and ongoing act by which God
honours Man and honours each human person. God ‘pays’ us the dignity
and honour by which we can pay one another honour and dignity. In this
primal gift of recognition and honour given by God to Man and to each
man, we receive the means by we can give one another our recognition
and esteem. The gift of God is therefore the basis of all giving-in-
exchange and of whatever currency denominates our exchanges. So
Christians are set to work by God to hold out this larger economy of love
and gift, the economy of God, on which the economy of buying and
selling, the economy of man, is based. This is the Christian work, but it is
not onerous so we may take delight in it.

God is in covenant with man. This covenant is the basis on which man is
with man and each of us may give ourselves to other people, truly and
definitively. We may give ourselves and so come into relationship with
someone who is not ourselves. Because we are different from one
another, we are able to bring something that the other did not have. Only
another person can complement a person, and together they may bring
about a relationship which no other set of persons may revoke. These
concepts of covenant, love and gift have very distinct economic
consequences which we will see in the next chapter.

3. Discipleship and independence

Formation and self-knowledge
If we talk about economics first and the Christian faith second, nothing we
say is either Christian or useful. When we do not put the gospel first, we
are only repeating what all others say, and bringing nothing distinctive to
their discussion. But Christian faith is primary, for it is a fundamental
economic factor.

Christian discipleship makes us self-controlled persons, no longer entirely

propelled by our passions. The ability to say ‘no’ to our own immediate
desires is the irreplaceable gift given to Christians. It is the first step to
freedom. God, the true judge, is able to release us from our sin and give
us mastery of our passions. Through baptism we are freed and can begin
to acquire this elementary self-mastery. Christians understand that our
passions and lack of self-control comes from within us, and that we are
each of us are own worst enemy. No one can do as much harm to us and
we can do to ourselves. Christian discipleship puts us in an apprenticeship
in which we learn to master our passions. Then we cease to blame others
for our situation, may begin to see beyond ourselves. We are freed to
love, and to act, first for ourselves, then for those closest to us, and then
more widely. Only through Christian baptism and within this Christian
community and its discipleship are we freed to acquire this self-control by
which we are free to act well towards one another. This baptism has a
positive economic outworking, both long-term and immediate.

Self-judgment
The covenant of God with man gives us the security to want to hear the
judgment – the truth of our identity – from God. But without that security
though we evade that judgment, and then it is irrelevant whether we have

14
demanded too much or not demanded enough. We do not value ourselves
enough, and all our materialistic impatience and over-reaching is nothing
but compensation for this crisis of morale, a failure to value ourselves.
Our chief denigrator is ourselves; we devalue ourselves in the fear that if
we don’t others will do so more, but we do so in defiance of God, who is
the true judge of man. God finds man good and loves him. Unbelief is a
failure to receive the good judgment of God and thus our own failure to
judge well. Long-term failure to hear the true estimation of man the
gospel results in a society with wildly see-sawing estimations of its worth,
reflected in wildly fluctuating markets. Societies that believe that they are
loved by God have a steady, realistic and ultimately they prosper.

The society that does not know how to judge itself bounds and rebounds
from boom to bust, its optimism and pessimism equally unfounded. We
cannot say whether the standard of living we have experienced all our
lives is going to continue as things will pick up again, or whether it is now
over and the gains of our lifetimes are about to prove unsustainable and
delusory. Is our economy basically sound? How should we see ourselves?

The gospel puts the question to everything we do and invites us to

undergo a little self-assessment or audit. The Lord tests his Church and
each Christian receives the judgment and correction of God, so that they
serve as his witnesses and thus are faithfully the body of Christ for this
generation. The Church that takes this correction, represents for the world
the same invitation to self-judgment, to measure itself more truly. The
Church asks hard questions, and represents those questions by its very
existence and this is its usefulness of the society around it. The love of
God that the Church has witnessed to and embodied for these many
centuries, has made this just and a generous society, confident enough to
hear the truth. As a result this society of ours has even managed to
communicate some of these attributes to the wider world.

Becoming a public person

We can learn through our discipleship. We recover that self-control that
makes us more than simply our own bodies and needs, and learn to hear
the demands of others. To exercise self-restraint is not to act against
ourselves, but simply to act for one another. We learn to ‘use’ our bodies
well and so discover how to be free for one another.

We are embodied persons, persons with bodies. Our bodies are not our
masters, but we may be masters of ourselves as we achieve some control
over our own bodies. Many of our contemporaries do not see creation as
good, but have a functional and even pessimistic orientation to the world.
They are not happy with its materiality, and some are in revolt even
against the human body. This is not a new crisis, for pagan man has
always feared the sheer exuberance and materiality of creation, and the
chaos that comes from the uncontrollable variety of the people around us.
It is an old belief that the material world is a dark power, and that the
dark always threatens to overcome the light.

But Christians have an entirely different view. We regard creation as

good, and regard the limits on us that it represents as good too. Have we

15
been introducing technology and consuming resources excessively where
we should be exercising virtue and learning self-control, and even doing
so to save us from having to learn self-control? There is a moral poverty
that comes from treating creation as though it were bottomless. If
creation were infinite we would never have to exercise any self-control. It
is good that creation has limits. It is good that we explore and discover
these limits. To burn our way through creation is absolutely impoverishing
for us, for does not teach us to husband these resources or to wonder at
this creation, and gives us no opportunity for moral growth. It is as
bankrupt as wanting a world in which our food cooks itself and our beds
make themselves: if they did we would never have to interact with the
world or learn about it in any way. It is only because it is a finite world
that we have to learn how to act within it. It is only when we exercise
self-restraint that we can act generously and for other people. If we treat
creation as though it had no end we will never experience the joy of acting
with responsibility, and so with freedom and spontaneity. We would never
learn to distribute well, that is to give things as they are good for the
specific people we give them to, or give them to the degree and extent
that they are good for those people, and not more. And it is only the
opportunity of acting well and generously, that there is the joy which is
the whole point and purpose of creation. We reckon human body and all
its limits and challenges as good. We neither idolise the body or material
world, nor do we denigrate them, but we look forward to their
redemption.

Christian discipleship puts us in an apprenticeship in which we learn to

acquire self-control and to master our passions. The ability to say ‘no’ to
your immediate desires is the gift that frees us to love and act first for
ourselves, then for our families and then more widely. This has
immediately positive economic consequences.

4. Together
Man and Woman
The concept of covenant and gift also relates to the way that each man is
himself. Man is in himself either man or woman. Humanity is not unisex,
but sexed, and so dual. So man gives himself to his fellow as man to
woman. Men and women may desire and love each other enough to give
themselves to each other.

Each of us may give ourselves utterly and finally to another human being.
We may give ourselves to one other person. We may give ourselves to
this specific other person. In marriage we give ourselves entirely, once.
We have the dignity of attempting this one thing: it may go well and bring
huge benefits and joy, or it may not and bring only huge and lifelong
costs. Yet to give ourselves to someone else is our own act. In giving
ourselves we are masters of ourselves. In marriage a man gives himself to
a woman and receives the gift of herself that this other person makes him
of herself. There is no more fundamental act or form of human existence
than the gift-giving and -receiving that is marriage. Self-gifts that are
permanent are what marriages are.

16
When man and woman regard themselves solely as individuals, there is no
reason why they should come together in lasting mutual relationship. Male
and females may desire and meet each other briefly for private purposes,
but these can never generate public purposes: sex will result in no public
commitments.

But a man and woman may desire one another, and seek and find one
another. They may do so now, and they may also hope to desire to give
to, and receive from, one another increasingly and without limit. Since we
may hope to love one another more, we may welcome whatever discipline
supports our love. Love may be formed by the discipline given by the
greater community and willingly taken on by the man and woman
themselves, in the hope that it will help their love to grow. Marriage is a
form of mutual self-control that enables this self-giving that is directed to
a further self-giving and receiving and discovery.

A man may be called to be a husband and a woman to be a wife. He is

called to be husband to her only, and she wife to him alone. His call to be
her husband is also a call to create with her this little society, that is
distinct from society as a whole and from all other relationships of which
society is made up. Their relationship is exclusive, and it renews society
as a whole only because it is exclusive. Their calling is not simply as man
and woman nor generically as husband and wife, but it is her exclusive
call and claim on him and his singular call and claim on her. Only she can
make him a husband. The purpose of the biological distinction of man and
woman relates to their call to become husband and wife: this sexual
difference given by nature is our invitation to hear this call and take up
this vocation. Nature precedes this decision only as a question. They are
not bound by nature; nature offers to provide the means and idiom by
which they can bind themselves to one another, and by which all society
can receive their binding and covenant as good, also for itself.

Self-gift, freedom and permanence

A marriage is the public recognition given by society, of the single
household and single ‘person’ that this man and woman make. A marriage
creates a little society. This relationship of one man and one woman
generates a new household and new society, one which is as primitive and
basic as ‘society’ itself. The little societies created by marriage serve the
renewal of society as a whole.

Any man and woman may give themselves to one another, irrevocably
and so enter the covenant that creates a new little society, a family.
Marriage is uniquely suited to turn babies into mature members of society.
Marriage of one man to one woman for life is understood to be the natural
order is recognised by Jews, Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. Marriage is
the joining of two. This is not a merely numerical two, of two identical
units, but two opposites. Only as they are of different natural and
biological constitutions can they be complementary and mutual embodied
persons. Marriage is the joining and reconciliation of what is different: one
half of the world is reconciled to and comes together with the other half.
The two halves of the world, night and day, left and right, top and bottom,
come together and are reconciled. Marriage can therefore only involve

17
sexes that are different and so be the marriage of a man with a woman. 8
The Church can only recognise this marriage and point to and support all
law that recognises this creation ordinance and this ‘natural law’.

When marriage of one man is not recognised as natural and as God-given,

but is instead made a matter of the will, there is no reason why marriage
should not be between two partners of the same sex. Indeed there is no
reason why it should not be between more than two partners. In a
marriage of two, each considers the other to be their match, their entire
counter-part and equal. In any relationship of more than two, that entire
dedication of one person to another is ruled out, and thus one person can
no longer be considered to be the equal of another. The integrity of this
entire gift of one person to one other person in love and freedom and love
is then over. Only when we are in possession of ourselves can we give
ourselves entirely into the hands of someone else, stick with that decision
and not seek the aid of others to undo what we ourselves have done or
attempt to relieve ourselves of the responsibility that we took on.

Two people who are married to each other exercise their self-control and
self-possession together and for one another. Their joint act makes them
one single body, ‘one reproductive principle’. 9 ‘The two shall become one’,
and so also become more truly two distinct persons, for within marriage
they are both more ‘two’ and more ‘one’, not only more together but also
more truly individuals.

What is unique about marriage is that it truly is a comprehensive sharing

of life, a sharing founded on the bodily union made uniquely possible by
the sexual complementarity of man and woman—a complementarity that
makes it possible for two human beings to become, in the language of
the Bible, one flesh—and thus possible for this one-flesh union to be the
foundation of a relationship in which it is intelligible for two persons to
bind themselves to each other in pledges of permanence, monogamy,
and fidelity. 10

Though the Church did not invent marriage it offers Christian discipleship
as the best means to learn to love and serve one another so that marriage
is sustained and their love and these two persons themselves grow within
it.

The equality of man and woman in marriage

We can contrast two accounts. On the non-Christian account, man is
merely an individual, fundamentally on his own. If this is so, men are on
their own and women are on their own. Then masculinity and femininity
are opposites and man is threatened by feminity and weakness and
woman is threatened by masculinity and power. If this is so, man has to
be controlled for the sake of woman, a control which is never finally
established and may need to become more coercive.

8
James Q. Wilson The Marriage Problem: How Culture has weakened Families (New
York: Harper Collins 2002; Christopher C. Roberts Creation and Covenant
9
Robert George in George and Elshtain The Meaning of Marriage p. 151. ‘one reproductive
principle’
10
Robert George ‘What Marriage and what it isn't’ First Things, July 2009

18
Christianity, by contrast, says that man and woman are made for
covenants with one another. Man is given to woman and woman to man.
When, in the Letter to the Ephesians, Saint Paul tells us that the dividing
wall between man and woman is broken, he means that in Christ these
two estates may serve one another in freedom now, all antagonism
ended. He does not intend to say that the difference between them is
abolished and we are dissolved into a unisex, but that the difference
between man and woman finds its goal. When they come together in
covenant, they do so in love. They are not simply compelled by biology to
do so, but may do so in freedom, and so as independent persons who can
decide for one another. They have reasons for coming together and for
being distinct and non-identical. In freedom this husband and this wife
create a new unity and duality. They are one, who are also two. Marriage
enables self-discovery: it provides the discipline and culture by which each
of us may grow in ourselves, as we grow towards our marriage-partner.
Their unity allows each of them to grow into his or her own particularity
and uniqueness.

But what about the equality of men and women? When a man and woman
freely enter a covenant, in which he becomes a husband and she becomes
a wife, he recognises her as his equal, and she recognises him as her
equal. They become equals in this covenant, promising to be a match for
one another. He may aspire to be worthy of her, and she to be worthy of
him. Marriages work when each party talks to other up, and reckons the
other more, rather than less, than him- or herself. They must hope to be
mates in a future that is not entirely known to either of them. In what
aspects man and woman may be asymmetrical and thus equal, or not
equal, cannot decided solely by the present, so their equality is a matter
of hope and redemption.

It is not women (defined solely by biology) but wives, relational beings,

who may freely represent the inner world of the household. It is not men
but husbands, relational beings, who may freely represent the outer world
of public square and marketplace. As each man and woman come
together in this covenant, they bring the household and marketplace into
mutual relationship, so that each serves the other. But if men are, either
by nature or by culture, members of the public economy, are woman
prevented from finding their identity in that economy? Do the demands of
equality and thus of justice not demand that the distinction between these
two economies be removed? We only need to acknowledge that there is
such an asymmetry, and that as a result the present cedes something to
the future, and we may look forward to a redemption of our present time.

If the private economy of the household is the sphere of the married

woman, the public economy of the market and formal economy is the
sphere of the married man. The distinction between husband and wife is
analogous to the distinction between public and private realms. Yet there
is never husband without wife nor public sphere without the inner sphere
of the household. Each economy exists only as its seeks and serves the
other. The distinction between these economies and functions continues
as people are willing to give themselves to this one other person and so
become husbands and wives, for the sake of that which they can only

19
bring into existence together. The public sphere may aspire to be worthy
of the private sphere of the family, and that this generation may aspire to
be worthy of the previous generation and of the next. Each party must
talk up the other, and so aspire to an ‘equality’ which hopes for
redemption but which must remain presently under-determined. Equality,
like unity and reconciliation, has an eschatological referent: it is a function
of hope, which itself the function of that covenant in which faith and love
also feature.

There is both a given difference between men and women, described by

the doctrine of creation and natural law, and there is a promised
difference that relates to the redemption of men and women, described by
eschatology. It relates to what we are, so to the present, and regards this
as good, even as the gift of God. And it relates to what we may or will be,
and so the course of our formation and transformation, and so to a future,
which since it is genuinely future, we cannot presently see.

Asymmetry and desire for the unlike

Man is one because he is first two. There is man only because there is
something besides man. There is a first, and therefore he is a second, or
he is a first because there is a second to him. Man is simultaneously one
and two. He is never first one, and then subsequently two. There is God,
and on this basis only, there is then man, and men.

This asymmetry is crucial. The asymmetry between God and man is the
guarantee and the driver of the asymmetry and complementarities and
reciprocity between man and man, and the basis of this asymmetry and
difference is the relationship between men and women. The relationship
between men and women drives all other asymmetry and
complementarities. Only difference creates need and drives a desire to
meet and mate and work with her, or him, who is unlike yourself, and
only from this relationship of man and woman comes the new event, the
arrival of a third party – children. The coming together of men and women
creates a new generation and thus the continuation of the human species
depends on this asymmetry. Thus there is an asymmetry between parents
and children, and between the older and younger generation. The
relationship between men and women drives all other asymmetry and
complementarities. The continuation of the human species depends on
there being asymmetry, for only difference creates need and drives a
desire to meet and mate and work with those, that is with she, who is
unlike yourself. Only this asymmetry gives mankind a continuation and a
future

Christian marriage
How do marriages work? Christians can suggest one way in which they
can work – through Christian discipleship.11 Marriages work when both
partners come together with other Christians and every Sunday hear the
promise of God's faithfulness and hear the question of their own
faithfulness, and go up to the altar together to apologise and receive
11
Bernd Wannenwetsch ‘Whose Marriage, Which Decline? How Theological
Accounts both rival the modern construal of marriage and prepared its way’
(INTAMS Review Journal for the Study of Marriage and Spirituality vol 14.1 2008

20
forgiveness, from God, and from one another. Then marriage can provide
the long-term security in which children can grow and in which their own
eventual readiness to receive and enter covenants, and their own
generous individuality, may develop.

The Christian confession is that God is with man. Man is never isolated
and alone, rather he is singular because he is recognised and affirmed so
by those who receive him so. His individuality is the function of his
relationships. The covenant of person with person is derived from this
fundamental covenant of God with man. God has ‘married’ man to himself
(Ezekiel 16): man is thus at once a married and a singular being.

All human encounter is founded in God who is himself, and thus one, and
who is with us, and thus two and one with us. Marriage is the fundamental
demonstration of this singleness and togetherness, of man. Every
encounter and transaction of man with man reveals and affirms our unity
and duality. Each encounter and transaction is an instantiation of the
covenant of man with man, that rests on the covenant of God with man.
There is only this one-on-one covenant of marriage that witnesses to the
promised permanence of man’s relationship with his fellow. This
fundamental covenant of marriage, and the household it creates, gives
purpose to all other encounters and transactions.

The covenant of God with man is primal: nothing is antecedent to it or has

either authority or power to undo it. The source of all human oneness and
unity is the covenant in which two persons are created a single ‘person’.
The covenant that makes this single ‘person’ of two married persons is
primal and indissoluble. All other covenants, business relationships and
forms of the individual-state relationship are derivations of this covenant;
they will either acknowledge and honour it or attempt to substitute for it
and replace it. All transactions are one, only as they serve to reflect and
support this phenomenon that humans may be at once one and two,
simultaneously single and particular, and together and plural. This will
become relevant when we ask whether the state supports our covenants
or effects to weaken all covenants other than with itself.

The created difference that give us these two halves of the human race
secures further differences and forms of complementarity. The
relationship between men and women drives all other asymmetry and
complementarities.

Marriage and singleness are not simple opposites for each marriage
confirms the singleness and unity into which God has brought man. Each
married person is married to one specific other person, so they are
committed to the uniqueness of that person, so the particularity and non-
exchangeability of persons is demonstrated. Marriage also affirms that all
humans are relational beings, ready for particular commitments to
particular other persons. The human being is an intrinsically social being.
A human being who is entirely without relationship to any other is
unthinkable. We are all already ‘covenanted’ and so ‘married’ – to one
another for God has married man to himself, betrothed before man came
into existence. We are intrinsically and utterly relational beings,

21
inconceivable without this relationship with God. Without God establishing
and sustaining this relationship, we have no existence. Man is never on
his own so there is never man without God. God and Man are not
opposites or rivals. It is entirely because he has this friend, is in this good
company and so is with God, that there is man in the first place.

The Church is the true covenant and so the true form of marriage. The
Church is this covenant that makes us single. This relationship holds
individual persons together as integers so that each of us can be a person,
rather than a bunch of competing and ultimately mutually-destructive
urges. They see to it that I do not dissolve into my constituent parts.
Within the covenant that is the Church I am single, so truly a unique and
self-possessed person. True marriage with God, which is life in his bride
the Church, is the one means by which my singleness, uniqueness is
established.

Humankind was in relationship with God before the first human came into
existence, and Christians have described this as being betrothed or
married to indicate the closeness of this relationship. We are inconceivable
without this relationship, for we are intrinsically and utterly relational
beings. God’s establishment and sustaining of this relationship, is
fundamental to our existence. Man is never on his own; there is never
man, without God. God and Man are not opposites nor rivals. It is entirely
because he has this companion and is in this good company, and is God's,
that there is man in the first place.

Every marriage is a confirmation and establishment of an existing

marriage, between God and man, and of the singleness, or singularity, of
each human being. Each of us is particular and unique. It is the teaching
of the Church that Christians are single unless they are married. They are
celibate and self-controlled. Only when you have acquired a degree of
self-control can you give yourself to someone else. We could say that
marriage is not so much a departure from celibacy as one particular
expression of it. You are given by the Church to one other human being,
for life, so you can be chaste together. When a man is married to a
woman, it is a creation ordinance, which is to say that it is an expression
and affirmation of the doctrine of creation: in each marriage, man is
married to woman, earth is married to heaven, day is married to night,
man is married to God, all creation is married to God.

There is a distinction between those who are, and are not, married. This
distinction generates another, between the household that a marriage
creates, and the world outside that household. Members of households
meet and enter covenants with members of other households, and so
there is a world of civil society, business and politics. There is a public and
a private sphere, so there are two sectors or two economies. There is the
economy of the household that is created by a marriage. And there is the
public economy of the market and public square, which we know as ‘the
economy’. There is the home and the market square, the private and
public spheres. Each serves the other; neither should attempt to absorb
the other or make it redundant. There is a distinction between these two
economies, the inner and outer, and a symmetry between them. But that

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symmetry cannot be complete. The tension created by their inevitable
asymmetry generates the movement from one generation to another, and
so ensures the continuation of society through time. Too much symmetry
forestalls this movement by which one generation brings another into
existence.

5. Two Societies, two economies

There are two societies. There is ‘Society’, and there are the Christians
within it. There is the nation, and there is the Church within it. We
contrast these two societies. The distinction between them and the
contrast this enables us to make is the basis of our examination of our
economy and of economics as a description of the economy. In the ‘City of
God’ Augustine says there are these two distinct communities, one is
hidden in the other. There is ‘Society’, our nation or whatever other
community we identify with, and within it there is that other community
we call the Church. Everything that we have to say depends on the
distinction between Society and the Church, or between the Church and
the world, or between the Christian and non-Christian. [Augustine City of
God 19.17; Cicero De Re Publica 3.43]

The Church is the economy of love. Like any other household, it is made
of members of a family who love one another. It is a single family, whose
members regard one another as brothers and sisters, children and
parents. They do not charge one another for their services because they
do not regard each other as members of different households. We can not
only say that there are two societies, but also that there are two
economies, the present worldly economy and the present-and-future
eternal economy. The present worldly economy is one in which men
compete for glory and honour, but within it there are little economies –
households – in which a man and woman are bound to one another in
love. The Church is that unique entity that combines these two, for it is
the household united by love which extends to include all. It is the world
become a single family and household. This enables us to ask what
features of this economy will help it to last and so to have a future (and
stretch towards eternity), and to ask what features make the future of this
economy more doubtful. The contrast between the economy of the Church
and the economy of the world enables us to ask about the long-term of
the economy of the world, and so the contrast between them is the basis
of any Christian analysis of economics and the economy.

There is the love of God for man. And there is another love, that is not the
love of God for man, but the love of man turned away from God and away
from his fellow man. When we do not receive the love of God and hear the
judgment of God we will certainly be possessed and divided up by these
other ‘loves’. Evasion of the love of God, failure to hear the Word spoken
to us and to learn self-control and self-government results in this whole
vast engine of delusion and hopelessness. When we are in flight from the
love of God we give ourselves away in all other directions. The cultic
service of the entertainment industries is dedicated to promote the cult of
the perpetual power of the unguided love-free individual will.

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We have to identify two societies, mingled together. One is the society of
man trying to be without God. The upshot of these efforts to be without
God is that each defines himself without anyone else: that no one
concedes that anyone has any fundamental claim on him. This man who
wants to be without God retreats into isolation and is obliged to construct
whatever controls he can to prevent the world from making demands of
him. By seeking love, refusing it, then substituting for it, this man inflicts
a process of disintegration on himself. He and his society will suffer a
passion with no end. The other is the society of man who is with God,
which is to say, the communion of the Church. The Church travels through
the society of those who do not acknowledge this love, assuring them that
they are loved with an unchanging love, that God at once knows, judges
and loves them also, and that they may therefore take life with
confidence.

The good
We may not only act, but act well, for the common good. Economics itself
simply gives us one language by which to evaluate our efforts. We have to
ask ourselves the question of how our economic activity contributes to the
common good. Economics does not do this for us. it simply helps us do
this for ourselves. In order to talk about what we do, we have to do so in
terms of whether we act well, and thus in terms of what is good. The
whole discourse of economics is simply a technical discourse that enables
us the better to identify and isolate some relationships in order that we
perform them well. It does not tell us what is good and what is not. We
have to decide this in other ways. Nevertheless, the language of
economics can help us direct ourselves towards what is enterprising, to
start new undertakings, and so taking up our freedom to act.

Public talk about what is good gives us the framework that makes sense
of all efforts, including our economic activity. The language of economics
can help us to judge, for example, to assess which enterprises are making
a public contribution, and which are self-serving, monopolistic and
represent a block on enterprise.

The deep assumption that we are all oriented to towards what is good,
rather than what is destructive, is essential. Every economy depends on
the existence of a measure of common interest, rational behaviour and
self-government and so on trust. It depends on the rule of law, for a free
market will develop only in a moderately law-abiding society. Where
everyone is terrified that they will lose what they have worked for because
it will be taken from them by force they will bother to produce very much,
and an economy will not develop beyond subsistence levels. A basic level
of trust and security, and this basic assumption, that others are not set on
harming us, is fundamental for any market whatever.

Modern economics offers only one of the two accounts we need. It offers
us the finite account in which each encounter is instantly and completely
denominated – and so effectively complete and finished. It does not look
for anyone more, it does not understand itself as promise and covenant.
So economics understand each transaction and each event as a unit and
monad (so as the momentary repetition of something that is timeless).

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Man as the creature with future
The Christian doctrine of God has its public and political outworking. It
sets out an account of the ground on which human persons may come
together and find each other valuable and interesting. It sets out an
account of our political freedom and our individual dignity that is larger
than any other account.

Covenant means that there is something before man, or more minimally

still, there is something that is not man. But the Western default is that
man is first individual and that society, and everything other than man
(such as creation) is not quite as essential, but its existence depends on
him, as thus a matter of his will, that it has to seek him permission in
order to have an existence or validity, permission that can be rescinded
and the threat of this withdrawal always hangs over him. There is a crisis
of existence, because man is taken to be the only true thing that exists.
This secures the dignity of creation independent of us. We have to
observe the limits it represents for us. All this is the result of not making
covenant first or co-first.

The second thing that comes with covenant, is the undertaking that there
is a future to this relationship and that is it not yet everything that is shall
be, and thus the thought of a future and the virtue of hope (ambition,
vision – and meaning and purposefulness). If man is a function and
creature of covenant, if he is not merely an individual but also a plural
creature, then there exists also the thought that he is not yet what he will
be. And thus we arrive at the thought of history, and that each of us can
contribute and make a difference to human history and that our lives are
therefore meaningful and worth living.

If we are not yet what we may be, we have the possibility of learning and
developing, of human formation and cooperation in this formation, and so
the idea of education. The humanities are education – they are all about
the formation of man, taken to be this creature-in-formation, this creature
with a future. So then economics is about human formation – that is
about growing, becoming at once more social and more individual. Human
maturity must be the chef product of any economy. Man is the creature
who can grow, and the growth of human beings is the purpose of the
economy.

This call makes us the future-orientated people. And the discovery of the
future is the greatest discovery which the Christian faith has brought us.
It is what makes us human. The first thing that is required is the prospect
of a new generation. All human life is meaningless the moment it becomes
clear that we will soon run out of men. But it is also becomes meaningless
when it becomes clear that there is no one to receive the world we have
made and declare it worth having.

Our self-valuation can only ever be provisional. We are worth what we say
we are only if the generation that follows us agrees with us. It is for our
grandchildren to affirm that we are indeed worth as much as we believe.
We have to work in order to earn their good estimation. This means that

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we have to work to bring about the society and economy in which they
can take their place, a place which is no smaller than the place we
inherited from our own parents.

Fundamental to the concept of hope is the prospect of a new generation

to continue the human race. Our present life is without meaning if the
future turns out to contain no human beings. The future can only be the
human future, the future of persons who receive, recognise and
acknowledge one another, and do so on earth and for the sake of the
earth. Christians are the future-orientated people because they are the
people who wait, for whom, since they are the people summoned, the
future is a real question.

The household, asymmetry and the future

The relationship between men and women drives all other asymmetry and
complementarities. The human species depends on this difference
between them, for it creates the need of each for the other, and drives
our desire to meet and mate and work with this member of the other sex.
The complementarity of the sexes is the basis for the production of a new
generation, and the continuation of the species from one generation to
another.

Our starting point has been that the Christian view of man is essential to
the economy, and thus that the presence of Christians is essential to the
society from which that economy arises. The public presence of Christians
in a society has long-term trickle-down effect on the self-image and
confidence of that society. The Christian is the being of the present and
the future. He is present here and now, but the future is also hidden
within him. The non-Christian is the creature of just one time – this time,
now. The Christian combines present and future, binding this present
fragmentary time into that whole and entire time, so that through him
what is partial receive its renewal from the whole. He combines the short-
term and the long-term, so that together they belong to the that
unbroken time we call eternity.

There is a covenant and marriage between the present and the future,
between this generation and all possible future generations, but only the
communities, chiefly the Christian Church, that understand themselves in
terms of covenant are able to say so. The distinction between public and
private is analogous to the distinction between this present time and the
future. The future comes in the shape of a new generation that in the
birth of each child, and the long and costly investment in that child, which
only the private sphere of the household, recognised by marriage, is able
to make. Marriage raises public morale, and high public morale
encourages marriage. When marriage is not understood as covenant and
as public institution, cultural confidence is lost. Then singleness is
promoted over life together in the covenant which we can enter freely,
and we become dependents and employees of that other covenant that
we have not entered freely, the state. But the state cannot reproduce
society and cannot of itself motivate persons to do so either. The decline
of marriage represents a loss social capital and from this economic decline
follows. Modern economics conceives of man only as a one-generation

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phenomenon. It cannot concede that the significance of any person may
relate to his success in leaving behind him a society that is a continuation
of him. We must explore some of these trends, and relate the loss of the
concept of covenant to the society that does not know what to hope for or
how to wait for it.

In this first chapter we have said that human beings are free. We are in
charge of our own destiny. We are not merely natural beings, who do
things simply because they can't help themselves. We are not compelled,
do not live under fate, and any society that is prone to such fatalism
would not be full of persons who take their own free initiatives, and so
could hardly develop an open market.
The exercise of this freedom is not entirely straightforward. We do not
exercise it against others, but with them and for them, and we may learn
how to exercise that freedom better. And we have said that love is
fundamental. We live through our relationship with other people, and in
particular through the particular people we love. Our love for them
motivates us to work for them. We need motivations, and love gives us
our motivation. In this chapter we have pointed out both that freedom
and love are essential to the economy, and that freedom and love are the
products of the Christian contribution to the cultures in which a developed
economy has arisen. Not only has the Christian understanding of man
been instrumental in the origin of the Western economy, but the
continuing presence of that concept continues to be an important, though
not often acknowledged, source of the vitality that drives our economy
today. In the next chapter we have to show how love and freedom effects
our work, the contribution we all make to the community and wider world
around us.

Summary

1. An economy arises from a culture. It receives its proper mandate and

limits from that culture and flourishes to the degree that a wide level of
trust is achieved.

2. Economics is an abbreviation of other fuller accounts of human

interaction. It is useful to the degree that it defers to the whole complex
account of man given by the humanities. Economics is necessarily a
limited explanation relying on a conceptual frugality, since it considers
person-person encounter in isolation from their effect on society as a
whole and so over their short-term.

3. The Christian faith gives a complex account of man. It describes his

freedom to act and encounter with his fellow man. This faith produces a
culture that is the accumulated deliberation on the action and freedom of
man. It has given rise to the intellectual disciplines, the Humanities, which
examine that culture, and which are themselves shaped by the questions
posed by the Christian faith.

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4. The Christian gospel gives us an account of man as a being who
interacts and transacts with his fellows and so is a political actor and
economic agent. The gospel points us to principles for any economics. It
does not offer us a whole economics, because it suggests that there
cannot be a comprehensive economic theory.

5. Man is an embodied person. The person is the whole purpose of the

economy. Our bodies are the means by which we are available to one
another. We serve one another by presenting one another with the
sustenance for our bodies, by which we can continue to be present to one
another as persons.

6. Man is a social and an individual being. He is distinctively himself and

on his own, and he is with others, and thus social. He is public and
private.

7. Human beings are made for relationship with one another. Marriage is
a public acknowledgement and affirmation of the single and double status
of human beings. We may give ourselves to one another permanently,
man to woman, in the covenant of marriage. We may compare the society
of man who know that he is loved (and so directly and freely receives this
love) with the society of man who does not know this love.

8. Man is male and female: these exist in mutual service. We desire to be

desired. We give ourselves and hope to be wanted and sought. Self-giving
depends on difference and matures complementarity. Marriage forms us
to be truly distinct and complementary, male and female, and to desire
each other firmly and without limit.

9. Marriages consist in economic and material as well as emotional

provision. Love and marriage are distinct from one another; marriage can
support love, and love can grow in marriage. When their economic
function and the mutual dependency of partners is not removed,
marriages raise morale and create social confidence and social capital.

10. A married husband and wife are open to the appearance of a third, a
child. Marriages motivate the production of children. It forms children into
mature adults. As adults these children will be ready to enter their own
marriage covenants. The family and the household produces children and
brings them up. Without the family and household there is no new
generation.

11. A child can claim the right of the ongoing service of the two persons
who brought him or her into existence. They are responsible for his
existence and also responsible for his giving him the basis of his
confidence as a mature and social adult. A child has a right to experience
the evidence that love and self-giving and the permanence of commitment
works, in order to gather the confidence to commit him or herself in the
same way.

12. Love aspires to permanence, and so seeks the correction and

discipleship that will make it permanent. Christian discipleship teaches

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self-control. It gives us an ability to act for the long term and to wait, to
defer our gratification. It is only when we exercise self-restraint that we
can act generously and for other people. Marriage create social capital
which enable subsequent generations.

13. The reproduction of persons requires the contribution of society

through social educative provision. Thus the person is not solely the
product of the household but also dependent on the reception and
recognition by the wider society. We need more than our parents in order
to become persons.

14. Economics is about the production of a new generation. It is about

the production of a new generation , both biologically (the formation of
humans) and culturally (the formation of the adult persons).

15. The society that understand itself as a covenant, to be treasured and

desired, for which we may give thanks, will produce marriages. And
marriages will result in children who formed in that civilisation will as
adults be able to desire, love and serve and initiate new covenants. We
may take permission from the past of our culture and economy to give a
future for that culture and economy.

16. Earlier generations understood us as embodied persons. Increasingly

from the early modern period we got into the habit of referring to
individuals, on one hand, and bodies on the other, as though they were
unrelated entities. As a result we have two separate ways of discussing
human beings: we talk about persons (citizens – political discourse) and
we talk about the bodies of those persons (desire – economic discourse).

17. We have two discourses, but not much connection between them.
Economics deals with the bodies. But bodies make no sense without
persons. We can discuss their needs, which are regular and immediate,
but we also have to connect these to the medium-and long-term
requirements that they also have because they are the bodies of persons
who have aims and goals.

18. The Christian account holds together bodies and persons, materiality
and purposes. It gives us an account in which we are motivated to act
freely, in love. This account that includes human motivations is a
necessary correction to the modern economic worldview. The public
contribution of the Christian community to any society is the motivation,
freedom and confidence of economic agent, and the open economy that
results.

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