Fourth Sunday in Easter

‘All marriages – all everythings – tote around contingencies whether we acknowledge them or don’t. In all things good and giddy, there’s always one measly eventuality no one’s thought about, or hasn’t thought about in so long it almost doesn’t exist. Only it does. Which is the one potentially fatal chink in the body armor of intimacy, to the unconditional this ‘n that, to the sacred vows, the pledging of truths, to the forever anythings. And that is: There’s a back door somewhere to every deal, and there a draft can enter.’


- Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land




‘A wise lord cannot and ought not keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that led him to pledge faith no longer exist…But it is necessary to know well how to disguise this characteristic and to be a great pretender and dissembler.’


- Niccolo Machiavelli




‘Words are for those with promises to keep.’


- W.H. Auden

Third Sunday in Easter

‘If the Cross radically puts an end to all worldly aesthetics, then precisely this end marks the decisive emergence of the divine aesthetic, but in saying this we must not forget that even worldly aesthetics cannot exclude the element of the ugly, of the tragically fragmented, of the demonic, but must come to terms with these. … It is not only the limitation and precariousness of all beautiful form which intimately belongs to the phenomenon of beauty, but also fragmentation itself, because it is only through being fragmented that the beautiful really reveals the meaning of the eschatological promise it contains.’


- Hans Urs von Balthasar




‘Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable…. To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.’


- Flannery O’Connor

Second Sunday in Easter

‘I have spent a lot of time searching through the Bible for loopholes.’


- W.C. Fields




‘No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means.’


- George Bernard Shaw




‘Every verse in the Bible is virtually a concrete faith-event in my own life….I have been personally present and have shared in the crossing of Israel through the Red Sea but also in the adoration of the golden calf, in the baptism of Jesus but also in the denial of Peter and the treachery of Judas….And we shall have to answer this question alone: whether, after the Word of God has sought to provide us with this movement and meaning, we have perhaps evaded it?’


- Karl Barth

Easter Sunday

‘What hard travail God does in death!
He strives in sleep, in our despair,
And all flesh shudders underneath
The nightmare of His sepulcher.

‘The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone;
All night the cold wind heaves and pries;
Creation strains sinew and bone
Against the dark door where He lies.

‘The stem bent, pent in seed, grows straight
And stands. Pain break in song. Surprising
The merely dead, graves fill with light
Like opened eyes. He rests in rising.’

- Wendell Berry

Palm Sunday

‘The church is sent into the world to challenge the false pretensions of the prince of the world, not in any power or wisdom or greatness of its own. It is sent in the power of his consecration. Its victory is the paradoxical victory of the cross. It is sent ‘bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in the body’ (II Cor. 4:10). The mission of the church is effected only through participation in the passion of Jesus as he challenges and masters the power of the evil one. And, conversely, there is no participation in Christ without participation in this passion and conflict.’


- Lesslie Newbigin




‘The cross alone is our theology.’


- Martin Luther

Miroslav Volf on Adam Smith

This is one of a series of posts developing material read for a Gordon-Conwell course on Social Justice for the efforts of Christ the King Presbyterian Church to reach out to our city.  The full index of such posts can be found here.  Critical comments are encouraged.

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One of the books I’m currently reading is Miroslav Volf’s Work in the Spirit (Oxford University Press 1991), in which he offers a charismatic theology of work[1] as a subset of life lived in the Spirit, as against a more commonly given vocational theory.  I’ll post more on the difference between these two in a later post.  For now I want to summarize and comment on his dealings with Adam Smith, continuing the thread begun with Milbank and Sen.

Smith, Volf writes in his second chapter, singled out human work as the source of human wealth: ‘The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences of life.’[2] But ‘work was not only the main source of economic wealth. It also provided the structure for the whole fabric of society.’ (48) The sociopolitical and intellectual character of society was largely determined by the prevalent modes of production; consequently, work assumed a central position in Smith’s thought, though not without paradox. The relation of society and of the individual to work were misaligned, a tension Volf finds unresolved in Smith’s work. For society, work was a means for achieving happiness for all, which was primarily to be secured through the  production of goods for consumption: ‘All the arts, sciences, law and government, wisdom and even virtue itself tend all to this one thing, the providing of meat, drink, payment and lodging for men.’[3] But for the individual, work was a necessary evil, without inherent human dignity and necessarily involving a sacrifice of liberty. Work was primarily a means of generating wealth, and if the distribution of that wealth were inequitable, those who accumulated more would find ways less and less to engage in the necessary evil of work, instead commanding the labor of others. ‘The more wealth one has, the more one will be able to “avoid irksome labour and impose it on others.”[4]‘ (50)

The paradox is partially resolved by noting that the central position that it occupied in Smith’s theory of societal welfare was not an inherent property of work; it would occupy this position only so long as it was the sole means of generating wealth. Thus Volf explains the drive in Smith’s thought to eliminate human labor from the productive process, especially his emphasis on the division of labor. The division of labor was more than a means of making human labor more efficient (and thus less necessary to generate a given level of wealth), however; in addition to its economic significance it held anthropological and sociopolitical signifiance. To the former, Volf believes that Smith reversed Plato’s dictum that essential differences across humans fit them for different occupations, holding instead that where all men were created equal, it was the differences in their activities that separated them in character, talent and virtue. To the latter, Smith believed that the division of labor favored civilized relations among men forced to exchange goods and labor with one another, an example of Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ principle that there exists a harmony between the individual pursuit of self-interest and the maximization of social welfare.

This is not to say that Smith failed to recognize the alienating effects of the division of labor. The majority of the population, he observed, are powerless in their dealings with the wealthy minority that employ their labor; they are exploited and estranged from their true selves by the stupefying effects of performing a single menial task with minimal contribution to a final product. ‘The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations… generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as is possible for a human creature to become. … mutilated and deformed in an… essential part of the character of human nature… all the nobler parts of human character may be, in a great measure, obliterated and extinguished’[5] in the great majority of the people. He offered no solution to this problem, but simply portrayed it as a necessary evil in advanced civilizations.  As Sen noted, Smith held that it was incumbent on the members of society to balance the excesses of the free market, and the corresponding inequities in wealth and opportunities for creative, fulfilling work (or leisure time), against the efficiencies to be gained from the market that make possible much of this wealth, and these opportunities, in the first place.  But he does not appear to have offered much of a systematic way of thinking about this,[6] and this makes more understandable Milbank’s position that Smith was offering essentially a heterodox theodicy, justifiying the actions of the Invisible Hand who had first instilled in humans the heterogeneous desires[7] that lead the division of labor and market efficiency.

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[1] Volf’s definition of work is ‘honest, purposeful, and methodologically specified social activity whose primary goal is the creation of products of states of affairs that can satisfy the needs of working individuals or their co-creatures, or (if primarily an end it itself) activity that is necessary for acting individuals to satisfy their needs apart from the need for the activity itself.’ (10-11)
[2] Smith, Adam, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, New York: Random House, 1937, p. 734
[3] Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenues and Arms, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896, p. 338
[4] West, E.G., Adam Smith, New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1969, p. 169
[5] Smith, Wealth, p. 734
[6] Neither, of course, did Marx, who is the subject of the rest of Volf’s second chapter; Marx, to the contrary, saw the same tradeoffs – both costs and benefits – identified by Smith and simply concluded that free market capitalism was a bad deal. It is important to note, though, that he did recognize the wealth-generating capacity of capitalism, and held that it was for this very reason a necessary stage in history: one needed a surplus of wealth to have sufficient leisure time to reorganize society along communist lines.
[7] Volf fails to recognize this exception to the extent to which Smith believed that all men are created equal.

Fifth Sunday in Lent

‘I find nothing in theological Christianity to be more difficult for me to apprehend than the conception of Jesus Christ as a dying and reviving God. The Incarnation-Atonement-Resurrection complex shatters both the… Hebrew Bible… and the Jewish oral tradition. I can understand Yahweh as being in eclipse, desertion, self-exile, but Yahweh’s suicide is indeed beyond Hebraism.’


- Harold Bloom




‘His emergence on earth was as it were the swelling in of heaven. His sacrifice began before He came into the world, and his cross was that of a lamb slain before the world’s foundation. There was a Calvary above which was the mother of it all. His obedience, however impressive, does not take divine magnitude if it first rose upon earth, nor has it the due compelling power upon ours. His obedience as man was but the detail of the supreme obedience which made him man. His love transcends all human measure only if, out of love, he renounced the glory of heavenly being for all he here became. Only then could one grasp the full stay and comfort of words like these, ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’ Unlike us, he chose the oblivion of birth and the humiliation of life. He consented not only to die but to be born.’


- P.T. Forsyth

Fourth Sunday in Lent

‘When we are being bluntly honest with ourselves, we know that what makes us most resist dealing seriously with Scripture is not fundamentally the Bible’s pre-scientific worldview or its historical obscurities. It’s the way it fingers all too accurately where we fall short here and now. What troubles us is not what is not clear, but what is.’


-Marguerite Shuster




‘To write about the cross is, like Jacob at Peniel, to wrestle with something or, rather, with someone, who is totally mysterious and utterly unconquerable – a someone whom you cannot let go because you know that he has it in his power, certainly to wound you at the sore places he exposes, but also to bless you and to change your name and your destiny.’


- Thomas A. Smail

Third Sunday in Lent

‘Anyone who forbids… grief must forbid, if he can, all friendly conversation: he must prohibit or extinguish affection; he must with ruthless disregard sever the ties of all human companionship, or else stipulate that such companionship must merely be made use of, without giving rise to any delight of soul.’


- Augustine of Hippo




‘At the very beginning of this book I referred to the cry of God in the garden of Eden: “Adam, where are you?” The agonized father seeking for the son who has been lost. Now the beloved son of the father has shared the fate of the lost children, and with them, for them, on their behalf, as one of them, he cries out to the father: “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” He goes down into the very depths of dereliction so that there could be no depths of despair into which we could ever fall in which the son of God would not be there beside us.’


- Lesslie Newbigin

Sen on Smith

More on Adam Smith, this time from 1998 economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.  The full article is here at the New York Review of Books, or in condensed version here at the Financial Times (registration required).

It is… worth mentioning… especially since the “welfare state” emerged long after Smith’s own time, that in his various writings, his overwhelming concern—and worry—about the fate of the poor and the disadvantaged are strikingly prominent. The most immediate failure of the market mechanism lies in the things that the market leaves undone. Smith’s economic analysis went well beyond leaving everything to the invisible hand of the market mechanism. He was not only a defender of the role of the state in providing public services, such as education, and in poverty relief (along with demanding greater freedom for the indigents who received support than the Poor Laws of his day provided), he was also deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might survive in an otherwise successful market economy.

Lack of clarity about the distinction between the necessity and sufficiency of the market has been responsible for some misunderstandings of Smith’s assessment of the market mechanism by many who would claim to be his followers. For example, Smith’s defense of the food market and his criticism of restrictions by the state on the private trade in food grains have often been interpreted as arguing that any state interference would necessarily make hunger and starvation worse.

But Smith’s defense of private trade only took the form of disputing the belief that stopping trade in food would reduce the burden of hunger. That does not deny in any way the need for state action to supplement the operations of the market by creating jobs and incomes (e.g., through work programs). If unemployment were to increase sharply thanks to bad economic circumstances or bad public policy, the market would not, on its own, recreate the incomes of those who have lost their jobs. The new unemployed, Smith wrote, “would either starve, or be driven to seek a subsistence either by begging, or by the perpetration perhaps of the greatest enormities,” and “want, famine, and mortality would immediately prevail….” ^[The Wealth of Nations, I, I.viii.26]  Smith rejects interventions that exclude the market—but not interventions that include the market while aiming to do those important things that the market may leave undone.

Smith never used the term “capitalism” (at least so far as I have been able to trace), but it would also be hard to carve out from his works any theory arguing for the sufficiency of market forces, or of the need to accept the dominance of capital. He talked about the importance of these broader values that go beyond profits in The Wealth of Nations, but it is in his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which was published exactly a quarter of a millennium ago in 1759, that he extensively investigated the strong need for actions based on values that go well beyond profit seeking. While he wrote that “prudence” was “of all the virtues that which is most useful to the individual,” Adam Smith went on to argue that “humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit, are the qualities most useful to others.” [The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 189–190.]

Smith viewed markets and capital as doing good work within their own sphere, but first, they required support from other institutions—including public services such as schools—and values other than pure profit seeking, and second, they needed restraint and correction by still other institutions—e.g., well-devised financial regulations and state assistance to the poor—for preventing instability, inequity, and injustice. If we were to look for a new approach to the organization of economic activity that included a pragmatic choice of a variety of public services and well-considered regulations, we would be following rather than departing from the agenda of reform that Smith outlined as he both defended and criticized capitalism.