A provocative book of Christian theology discusses the relationship between faith and money, challenging the presumption that material affluence is inherently bad and carefully interpreting Scripture to show that prosperity is the condition that God envisions for all human beings, provided that it is accompanied by stewardship and compassion.
The Good of Affluence
Seeking God in a Culture of WealthBy John R. SchneiderWm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2002 John R. Schneider
All right reserved.ISBN: 9780802833631Chapter One
The "New" Culture of Capitalism
Democratic capitalism is not just a system but a way of
life.
MICHAEL NOVAK
"OF THINGS NEW"
In 1891 Pope Leo XIII published an official letter named simply RerumNovarum, "Of Things New." Its reference was to the breathtaking changesthat had come over the Western world in the previous century: the greatrevolutions in democracy and science that had spread to all parts and beenmidwives to the birth of modernity. But the focus of the letter was most directlyon the "new things" that came with the new economic order of capitalism,For this new economic order - still in its awkward adolescence - hadalready begun to raise a legion of new challenges for Christians.
Of course the problem of "God and mammon" is not new. It is as oldas Christianity itself. H. Richard Niebuhr observed over half a century agoin his classic book Christ and Culture, that it is one of those perennialproblems that every generation of Christians must face in one form or another.But the forms of culture do change, and the things of capitalismwere in that sense of the word new. They were new incarnations of very oldquestions about our treasure on earth. They were like the new wine in Jesus'simile, and the old leathers of tradition were already cracking from thefermentation. The church urgently needed new wineskins, lest all authoritybe lost, and Leo XIII knew it - hence Rerum Novarum.
The need for new teaching on capitalism was clear and urgent enough.But what should be the answers to the questions it posed was anything butclear. Not a few Christian theologians had come to believe that capitalismwas a great, seductive evil, a harlot on seven hills that could deceive eventhe very elect. They believed that good Christians should do everythingthey could to defeat it. They had read the revolutionary writings of Marx.They observed the widespread exploitation of labor, the opulence of thefew, and the widening chasm between rich and poor. And in that grimlight, they had also read their scriptures with fresh eyes and awakenedhearts, and they did not find a very great difference between what theyfound in the Law and the Prophets and the vision of socialism put forth byMarx. They judged that he was right about the moral nature and future ofany society shaped by the order of capitalism. They believed that at the endof its evil was a grand triumph of irony: that capitalists would indeed manufacturethe very noose by which powers of justice would hang them onthe gallows of history. And the swelling ranks of Christian socialists seriouslybelieved (as many have done until quite recently) that state socialismwas the best framework for building a society that embodied the virtues ofChrist and the Gospel.
Leo did not agree - not entirely, anyway. His letter was no sterling defenseof capitalism (as none of the great encyclicals have been). The burnof his rather plain text is slow enough, but its sacred rage comes throughnonetheless. Its main focus is on evils done to this new class of workers - "labor" - in the name of this new form of property - "capital." But in responseto the new troubles and this newly proposed alternative to capitalism,Leo XIII did something that now seems very remarkable. For whilethe letter is indeed about the new social evils of capitalism, unlike theChristian socialists, he did not understand the essence of capitalism inthose terms. Instead, he looked into its deeper parts. And what he saw wasan order of economic life that was, in its core, the embodiment of certaineternal truths and virtues (both natural and distinctly Christian). Theseincluded the validity of private property, the primacy of the individual, theimportance and dignity of work, and the basic character of freedom - whichChristians must take care always to link with the distinctly Christiantruth about human beings as both created and fallen.
In sum, Leo XIII understood early that the evils growing from the systemwere not the marks of its true essence. He understood that they wereunnecessary and ironic indications of capitalism's strength. He understoodthat they grew from the distortion of something very good: that is,the newly won condition of freedom. It was the basic condition of freedomthat allowed people to pursue material happiness in this world in ways thathad never been possible before - not ever. So (and this is often forgotten)his powerful critique of capitalists in his day was also an implied affirmationof the basic principles in the foundations of the very system that theyabused.
Leo XIII thus understood capitalism in much the way that the churchhad learned (tortuously) to understand the other new orders of the revolution- democracy and free intellectual inquiry (science). The church hadlearned with no little difficulty to affirm these orders for the goods andtruths that they embodied rather than to renounce them for the dangersthat they, as orders of freedom, naturally carried with them. And it wascrucial that Christians give freedom the moral and spiritual direction itneeded. By the same reasoning, Leo XIII also presciently denounced socialism,alienated as it was from those key natural and Christian truths ofhuman existence. With that in mind he intuited its potential for evil, if notits sure demise. And his Christian sensibilities led him to believe that theMarxist order, no matter how appealing its rhetoric of justice, was completelyunfit in its metaphysics as a cultural environment for the expressionof even that basic social virtue.
Leo's encyclical is today a standard point of reference for official Catholicmoral theology on modern economic life. As Pope John Paul II observed on the one-hundredth anniversary of Leo's writing, it is indeed an"immortal document." But as he also pointed out, it is not immortal inthe sense that Christians can simply take its answers as given in 1891 to beanswers for all the questions about capitalism we have now. For the capitalismthat exists now bears almost no visible resemblance to capitalism asit was known then. Indeed, capitalism in 2002 looks significantly differentfrom the way it did even half a century ago. Neither Marx nor Leo XIII noreven John Maynard Keynes could have begun to imagine the global, high-techeconomy of our day, with its divisions of labor, its engines of investmentand credit, its astonishing distribution of capital and affluence - andthe really new challenges it poses. As John Paul II implied, RerumNovarum provides but a framework for the theology and ethics that weneed for coping with the new things of life under capitalism in our day. Butat very least, it stands as a monument to that most basic wisdom of all - thegood sense to know which end of the stick to pick up.
Christian intellectuals have made great strides in contending theologicallywith the modern orders of democracy and science. But when it comesto capitalism, for some reason we are still in the beginning stage. With rareexceptions, Christian intellectuals (as Western intellectuals generally) havenot offered systematic spiritual and moral guidance for living within capitalism.In contrast, we are long in supply of theologies that teach us how tobe good socialists - the entire movement known as liberation theology isa composite of...
