Theology Today - Vol 47, No. 2 - July 1990 - BOOK REVIEW - God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy

198 - God The Economist: The Doctrine of God and Political Economy

God The Economist:
The Doctrine of God and Political Economy
By M. Douglas Meeks
Minneapolis, Fortress, 1989. 257 pp. $12.95.

It may occur to some readers that to speak of God as "the Economist" is not terribly flattering to the One in whom we live and move and have our being. If so, that is not so much because we are disinclined to use

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human metaphors to characterize God as because this particular metaphor has a faintly distasteful point of reference. Royal and familial metaphors are long accepted and honored. But God the economist?

Meeks, former Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy at Eden Theological Seminary and now Dean of Wesley Theological Seminary , is precisely concerned to rescue economic thought from the popular connotations. Specifically, economics is not a detached, independent sphere of human existence governed by autonomous laws. It is integral to the whole human enterprise, and its meaning is ultimately theological just as all human meaning must be. The volume argues that the free market ideologies of our time contain important theological presuppositions and that the concepts of God typical in Western culture provide legitimation for these individualistic, competitive, consumer-oriented ideologies. But the deeper biblical understanding of God is of the "oikos," by which Meeks intends the world "household" in which all have access to livelihood.

In developing this theme, Meeks centers his argument on a social conception of the Trinity, each of whose persons are understood to be giving and sustaining, not self-sufficient and domineering. The argument is explored in relation to conceptions of property, work, and need. Property is, in trinitarian perspective, not so much the right to exclusive possession and use of anything (though Meeks does not deny the importance of some exclusive property rights) as it is the inclusive sharing of goods-just as each person of the Trinity shares its goods with the others. Inclusive property is property to which all, in common, have a right. Work, depicted ambiguously in our culture as both curse and source of meaning, is seen in Trinitarian perspective as redeemed from control by others. Need, which is ambiguously presented in our culture as systematically created consumer wants, is understood in Trinitarian perspective as fulfillable without scarcity in the oikos of God.

These themes, developed more richly than I can here relate, form a very substantial contribution to theological understanding of economics. The result is a deeply prophetic analysis of what is ultimately at stake in economic life. The effort to correlate a social doctrine of the Trinity to economics seems problematic at points (though I may not have grasped all of its nuances). I would have appreciated a more explicit acknowledgment that the God of the Trinity is still one God and not three gods. Still, as an exploration of the richness Christian faith perceives to be at work within the life of God and the implications the doctrine of God has for a Christian understanding of property, work, and need, this book is a first-rate contribution.

Christian thinking about economic life involves a chain of knowledge, with theological foundations at one end, empirical description at the other, and ethical analysis in the middle. Meeks' contribution is principally at the theological end of the chain and, in my judgment, it is the best such work to appear in many years. His efforts to correlate the theological perspective to contemporary issues in political economics are

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fairly limited (including, for instance, the importance of assuring everyone of the right to a job and an income). Moreover, it is not clear from his discussion how we are to contend with the principalities and powers of the contemporary economic regime. To what extent, for instance, should the power of the state be invoked to establish an economic order commensurate with the theological vision? Meeks affirms the importance of political democracy. But how are we to deal with the fact that democratic majorities often support exactly the kinds of economic distortions that his theological analysis so brilliantly exposes?

Still, no economic ethic will be better than its theological foundations. Subsequent work in Christian economic ethics will be greatly indebted to the foundations Meeks has developed here.

J. Philip Wogaman
Wesley Theological Seminary
Washington, D.C.