Plundering Egypt

A Subversive Christian Ethic of Economy

Wagenfuhr

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498202183
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Christian engagement with economics tends to baptize preexisting sociopolitical perspectives, thereby assuming a predetermined metaphysical narrative. What happens when the story of the development of economics, told from an anthropological and sociological perspective, is juxtaposed with a biblical theology that focuses primarily on relationships? Wagenfuhr tests a theological method grounded in three kinds of relationships--Creator-creature, estrangement, and Reconciler-reconciled--by comparing these with a fourth relationship: the economic. He argues that economic relationships, and the worlds they create throughout history, are the fruit of relationships estranged from God. Much theology has committed itself to a metaphysic rooted in the reality of economics and has told a metaphysical story that tends to legitimize current sociopolitical realities. Wagenfuhr argues that reconciliation with God is entirely subversive to economic relationships. No economic relationship or system is established or justified by God, but neither does he reject them. Instead, the love of God in Christ speaks the economic language of a people, with a critical edge, leading to loving subversion of any and all economic relationships. This book argues for a robust theology that offers the post-Christendom church a renewed sense of the total scale of God's mission of reconciliation.

1

The Theology of Relationship

What is presented here is a brief outline of the theological method that lies at the heart of this book. It is a newer method that is as original as any other idea can be. This means that it has influences, some that are readily apparent and others that are not. The clearest influence is Jacques Ellul (1912–94), the French theologian, sociologist, and professor of the history of institutions in Bordeaux. Though I see Ellul’s most important theological contribution as being a pioneer in a theology that highlights relationship while downplaying the importance of metaphysical questions, what follows here is not a summary of his work or ideas, but a development of some of the hints and minor points that Ellul makes throughout his work. Ellul did not develop a theological method based on this notion. His own method involved a similar juxtaposition of sociology and theology, but without significant theological development. Intimations in his work have helped lead me to this theology of relationship.

The Problem of Metaphysics

Who are we? What does it mean to be human? What is it that unites things and gives them meaning? Such questions are what metaphysics attempts to answer. Metaphysics answers these questions by exchanging or sacrificing relationships for a universal definition. Relationships must be exchanged, or traded, in order to have universality. For it is only by abstracting particulars that one can have universals, and yet the particulars are what make relationships meaningful. Pornography is an excellent example of this troubling exchange. By depersonalizing sex and turning what is an expression of a relationship into an expression of individual desire, one pursues technique and method—categories of behavior that elicit feelings of power and pleasure. The concentration on method, on categories of activity, and on types of objects, means that the woman is only important as an aesthetically pleasing machine. She, like a statue, is important only for what she represents, and what she represents is partially the responsibility of the man himself. One cannot express love mediated through universal categories. In doing so it is turned into self-love, a projection of the self. Pornography is often said to objectify women, and this is very true, but it also makes the man become a subject. The lone viewer of pornography enters into a solipsistic world in which women exist for his pleasure in creating his identity. But such women do not really exist at all, except in his eye and mind, for the image replaces the person. The addiction of pornography is like the addiction of metaphysics and the addiction of money. The more one desires the universal and finds it, the more unreal individuals and relationships become. Individuals have been exchanged for universality, love of another exchanged for love of the self. This is an economic relationship, as are all kinds of metaphysics, for they operate on the law of scarcity, on equilibrium, and so demand sacrifice to maintain balance. A relationship with one person cannot last long if it is done for the sake of individual pleasure because one is seeking an experience of universality and by definition experience of one particular cannot lead one to universality.

This is the problem of metaphysics: it is economic. When we return to more fundamental questions, like “Who are we?” or “What is being?” the lessons learned from pornography carry over quite well. In order to define a universal, we must take away particularity. Consider human ontology or human nature, what-it-means-to-be-human. We must begin with concrete relations that we have with other people and other animals, then abstract the concrete to form a universal. In doing this we exclude what is not like us, ever refining the process and excluding more subtly. Animals are excluded by means of rationality, for example. This eventually proceeds to excluding mentally disabled humans from true humanity. Rationality values itself and creates a solipsistic world in its own image. Rationality loves itself. Aristotle’s God thinks itself. In the end, human metaphysical rationality might be nothing more than an exploration and love of itself.

Creating universals in this way tends toward a certain political philosophy. It is not inconsequential that Aristotle was an enemy of the demagogues and the tutor of Alexander the Great. Nor is it inconsequential that virtue was his ethic, as this is an ethic based in attempting to achieve an ideal notion of what-it-means-to-be-human through the achievement of eudaimonia.1 Virtue and self-discipline tend inevitably toward mysticism because they are aimed at an achievement of an ideal that is difficult, if not impossible, to fully instantiate. By creating an abstract ideal Aristotle renders humanity something that must be obtained. We might say Aristotle’s metaphysic is virtuous, godlike, aspirational, or aggressive in that it strives after an exclusive human ontology. Another classic example of this would be Nietzsche for whom the word “human” carries a dirty connotation when he describes the herd as “all too human.”

An opposing definition of human might be called populist, democratic, inclusive, and passive, thus endowing all with equivalent rights, extendable in many cases to nonhuman animals. This again is based in an abstracted ideal rather than in a concrete particular set of relationships. The ethic of this sort of metaphysic is observable in liberal society, an ethic of entitlement and affirmation.

In either case we have extreme visions of what-it-means-to-be-human that necessarily produce an ethic that judges people in terms of their relation to an ideal; though this is an ideal that has been created by a person observing and analyzing actual relationships in a deeply historical context, building on the received metaphysics of generations. In this way metaphysical speculation begins to look less like speculation and more like Feuerbachian projection. The real problem of projection is not with God. The concept of the One, or God is simply the culmination of metaphysical inquiry. The real problem is metaphysics. The mechanism of projection is no less real for metaphysical universals than it is for God.

The building blocks of “reality” are people and things. But these two must inevitably merge into one by seeking unity or oneness. People and things become contained in nouns, in subjects and objects. They are “real” insofar as the description corresponds to “reality.” Metaphysics is problematic because it seeks after the real, presupposing the real to be found in or through nouns, thus finding an ultimate reality contained in an ideal person-thing, which usually happens to be called “God.” This ideal person-thing has all the features of both things and people, serving as the source of both. In this merging of people and things, any possibility of relationship is either excluded or is made essential, so that some theologians speak of a relational ontology. But what if our conception of metaphysics, and thus of God, is fundamentally problematic? What if we prioritized relationships over nouns? What if people and things were understood not only as forming relationships, but also as being formed by relationships? This would, of course, militate against a seeking for the One. It would also prevent turning a living God into a set of propositions or ideals. And it would force us to abandon any concept of essential similarity to God. This would force us to reassess how metaphysics leads to economic relations, how metaphysics as a subject was partly created by money, and how metaphysical thinking inevitably results in a divine legitimization of human economies. The problem with metaphysics, as we shall see with economics, is not that it is inherently violent or hierarchical, for egalitarianism depends equally on metaphysics and economics, but that it is a symptom of loneliness and estrangement from the Creator, his creation, and from his creatures.

The Problems of Epistemology and Ethics

The problem of metaphysics leads us to particular epistemological and ethical problems. Virtue ethics, and a maximal or aggressive notion of human ontology, go hand in hand, just as a populist or minimal human ontology goes hand in hand with a rights-based ethic, as we’ve said. Ethics depends on ontology for the source of knowledge of the good. We must distinguish between ethical method and values. Ethical methods, for example, agent-based virtue ethics, act-based deontology, or consequence-based utilitarianism, do not provide value data. That is, we might know how to attain the good, but we do not yet know what the good is. This good has often derived from the situation in which the ethicist has lived, whether supporting it or providing the terms for rebellion against it.

If we try to disentangle ethics from metaphysics we inevitably destroy its universal appeal and thus its power. Ethics must fit behavior into categories. Kant’s categorical imperative is the most obvious example. The purpose of ethical reasoning is to establish and encourage right action, action in accord with rule, principle, and nature. But ethics without ontology is highly relativist, that is, based in particular relationships rather than in universal ideals or rules, and so somewhat impotent.

Epistemology is also problematic if we prioritize relationships, because we end up focusing, not on how a universal “we” know, but on how individuals know. Indeed, relationship knowledge is quite different from factual or ontological knowledge. Relationship knowledge comes in narrative form, not propositional form. Romantic languages preserve this distinction much better than English. The difference in French of savoir and connaître attests to this. In English we say “I know that” to refer to factual or ontological knowledge, and we say “I know so and so” to refer to relational knowledge. As we will see in the biblical narrative, relationship determines epistemology and epistemology becomes problematized when people become estranged from God. Metaphysics can only explain epistemological problems in terms of the limitations or corruption of rational human nature. Metaphysical theology thus presupposes that human rationality is not limited or so thoroughly corrupt that it cannot grasp the divine or analogies of the divine. I will show through the biblical narrative that it is systematically impossible to know the divine if there is relational estrangement, because God reveals himself only in relationship and not in ontological similarity.

Primacy of Relationship

As will be seen in the course of this book an anthropological history of economics and the influence of money on the development of Greek philosophy and metaphysics will help demonstrate the primacy of relationships. The character of relationships determines metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, not vice versa. The development of coinage radically transformed relations in premonetary debt-based societies, with consequent changes to their cosmos.

Theologians and philosophers must deal with relationship before considering being, and after thinking about relationships it will usually turn out that being is a superfluous concept. Heidegger talks of a “thrownness,” the experience of being always-already within the world. This is an experience of previously established relationships. But instead of trying to find what lies behind or beyond these relationships, as Sartre attempts to do, perhaps accepting the fact of relatedness and examining it would prove far more fruitful than an investigation of what can never be known: being in itself. Relationships are not part of, or subordinate to, what-it-means-to-be-human, simply because this is unspecific. Humans are not uniquely social animals. Instead of describing what-it-means-to-be-human, relationships preexist questions of being. And it seems to me that it is not possible to transcend actual relationships by positing a notion of “relationality” that lies at the heart of human ontology, or ontology in general.

Granted, we can form a relational ontology, but such concepts are at best meaningless, and at worst highly self-deceptive. For what can be gained by notions of a social ontology, except an ethical imperative to be “more fully human” by relating to each other in this or that way? Indeed, most ethical arguments tend toward this end. The argument runs something like this: (1) x is what it means to be human; (2) it is an ethical imperative that humans be humans; (3) therefore, we as humans ought to do/be x. In this argument the second proposition is generally unstated. This second proposition, a tautological ethical imperative, enables ethicists to find or project an ethical agenda onto human nature without observing the absurdity. If I am human then I ought to act like a human, which requires me to look at a species identity, choose the aspects that are ideal and attempt to form my life around those ideal aspects of the species identity. Human flourishing, it is said, is most well achieved when we live up to our species identity. But it is just as easy to find another aspect of human nature to emphasize, perhaps conquering power, perhaps the ability to make enemies and overcome them through strength of mind, will, and body. Those who are weak are thus less than human, and are rightfully killed as abominations to the shrine of human nature. It ought to be clear that the form of ethical argument based in human ontology is absurd.

But countless philosophers and thinkers of various fields have followed in this tradition. Adam Smith is exemplary. He taught that humans are uniquely economic animals. After all, “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.”2 Humans are, by nature, creatures prone to “truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.”3 And so it is a moral imperative that the government not get in the way of human flourishing by th...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Theology of Relationship
• Chapter 2: A History of Economic Relationships
• Chapter 3: The Creator-Creature Relationship
• Chapter 4: Estrangement: Creating Cosmos
• Chapter 5: Reconciliation: Subverting Economic Relations
• Chapter 6: Plundering Egypt: Ethics
• Chapter 7: Conclusion: The Great Commission
• Bibliography