Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Congress for the Development of Economic Personalism

Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Congress for the Development of Economic Personalism
August 9-12, 2001
Grand Rapids, Michigan

May I begin by thanking you for joining us in what I hope will be the first of many annual conferences conducted under the auspices of the Acton Institute and focused on themes and ideas associated with economic personalism. Gathered here today are philosophers, jurists, economists, historians, and theologians–all of whom are committed to facilitating a meaningful conversation between Christian social thought and the modern discipline of economics.

This type of discussion is relatively rare in Christian circles, precisely because it is a difficult one. Though the roots of modern economics lie, intellectually speaking, in the thought of Aristotle, medieval philosophers, and the sixteenth-century Spanish Scholastics, there is little doubt that the dominant philosophical and anthropological influences on most modern economic thought have been generally positivistic in nature. Even today, there are many economists who are relatively uninformed of the ultimate roots of their discipline, and who have never questioned the moral-anthropological assumptions that underlie much of their work.

This state of affairs presents particular challenges for Christian scholars conscious of these issues, but who also believe that the Christian Church's ability to preach the Gospel and to evangelize the world would gain much from serious reflection on the character of subjective economic value, the reality of scarcity, the nature of self-interest, the difference between positive and normative economics, and the critical role played by law, constitutions, and other institutional settings in shaping the free economy and the free society. The challenge is magnified by the fact that the same scholars believe that the modern world would also gain from listening to a Christian Church that grasped the importance of these facts. Christianity has profound things to say about the social order, as evidenced, for example, by its doctrine of Original Sin, the Kuyperian notion of sphere sovereignty, as well as its teachings on the ultimate origin and purpose of material goods and economic activity. In this regard, the moral significance of our freely chosen acts in the economic realm is especially important, as it is through such acts that we can struggle to achieve integral fulfillment through participation in the human goods to which Aquinas says we are directed by right reason: ¹ the basic reasons for action that the encyclical letter, Veritatis Splendor, describes as “fundamental human goods.” ²

Such a conversation between the modern world–and, more specifically, modern economics–and Christianity is bound to be difficult. Part of the problem lies in the apparent inability of many contemporary Christian intellectuals to engage in a conversation with modernity that manages to be meaningful but also consistent with orthodox Christian teaching. There is, of course, no alternative to a Christianity that is fully engaged with modernity. But if such an engagement is to be meaningful, then Christians should maintain no illusions about precisely what they have been called upon to engage. Certainly, modernity has helped to create a world that is unquestionably more materially prosperous and scientifically advanced, but it has spawned some terrible beasts. The following list summarizes only some of the deep chasms between the respective visions of modernity and orthodox Christianity:

1. Modernity insists that God-talk is, at best, metaphorical and, at worst, irrational. Christianity teaches that the Creed professed by Christians every Sunday is the truth of the world.

2. Modernity's view of history remains that of the Continental late-Enlightenment: one of an “automatic” linear forward movement achieved almost by the passage of time and without enormous personal effort. Christianity, however, maintains that historical change is not necessarily ipso facto benign, and insists that without a shared knowledge, understanding, and belief in the objective moral order that transcends time, place, and culture, there can be no coherent, believable, or effective knowledge of how to improve either oneself or society.

3. Modernity imagines that salvation is a matter of achieving one's human potential. Christianity holds that while such achievement is important, salvation is ultimately a question of communion with God, in which our human potential is realized in an unsurpassable way by our free obedience to the truth.

4. Modernity understands evil primarily in social terms and largely as the result of disordered structures. Christianity holds that, in the final analysis, evil and structures of evil proceed from original sin as well as the personal choice of human persons to do evil rather than good.

5. Modernity insists that the hope of life after death is, if not delusional, certainly irrelevant to human liberation in this world. Christianity teaches that the Christian hope of life after death liberates us in the most radical way and thus makes a genuinely liberating transformation of the world possible in ways that politics cannot even begin to approximate.

6. Modernity conceptualizes reason in instrumental, technical terms. Christianity also understands reason to be capable of knowing moral, metaphysical, philosophical, and theological truth.

7. Modernity conceives of human beings as “nonbodily” persons that somehow inhabit “nonpersonal” bodies. Christianity, while recognizing the reality of consciousness, does not adopt this metaphysically-impossible-to-sustain dualistic vision of the human person. Christianity holds that each human being is a unity of body and soul.

8. Modernity considers the greatest work of human beings to be the way in which we shape our world. While noting the importance of building a better world, Christianity believes that the most important work that every human person can accomplish is his or her own realization of moral good.

9. Modernity understands morality in terms of externalities, that is, the effects of one's actions on others. It speaks of “the greatest good of the greatest number,” and is profoundly utilitarian–and thus irrational–in its inspiration and methods. Christianity disputes the consequentialist notion that the good is quantifiable. Instead, it insists that the morality of an act is determined by its object. Intentions may be noble, people may claim to be acting in good conscience, and circumstances may mitigate personal responsibility. Nonetheless, Christianity teaches that many human acts remain everywhere and always evil.

10. Modernity conceptualizes freedom as freedom of choice. Christianity underlines free will as a sign of our dignity as the imago Dei, but insists that one is only truly free when one lives in truth. As Deuteronomy states: “I set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live” (Dt. 30:19). This leads to a particular vision of freedom so aptly captured by Lord Acton's statement that liberty is “not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.” ³

Reflection on these points soon indicates that a genuine conversation between modernity and Christianity is bound to be difficult. It should also remind Christian intellectuals that a conversation between the church and the modern world is not necessarily one in which the world sets the agenda for the church. A genuine conversation is a two-way process, and more than one observer would agree that in recent decades too many Christian intellectuals have simply articulated pale imitations of whatever happens to be the latest secular intellectual fade. At all times, we must recall that Christianity has made a unique proposal to the world. As it engages with modernity, the church always looks at history through the prism of the redeeming Cross of Jesus Christ. That God entered his created world to redeem it has fixed once and for all Christianity's understanding of the world. The Christian believes that the Christian story of creation and redemption is the world's story, and that telling the world's story as this kind of story, and thus bringing it to conversion, is the greatest service that the church can render the world.

In contributing to this end, Christian intellectuals need to recognize that the secular world has its own autonomy. Modernity has taught us that there is no such thing, for example, as Christian physics, Christian biology, or, indeed, Christian economics. There is physics, biology, and economics–and the truths of these things are truths in their own right. They do, however, need to be related to the Truth proclaimed by the Christian Church: the truth of man's redemption and our transcendent destiny.

For all these reasons, it is surely appropriate that we devote this conference to clarifying the guiding principles of the project of economic personalism–the project of bringing Christian theology and philosophy into dialogue with modern economics–in the hope of showing the way forward to the growth of a free and humane economy in a free and virtuous society. In the papers to be presented by conference participants, as well as the prepared responses, we hope to clarify further the foundation of this attempt to bring Christian social ethics into a meaningful conversation with modern economics. As part of our discussions, may I suggest that the following questions be factored into our reflections?

Are we to understand economic personalism as a project, an idea, a set of principles, a method of interdisciplinary investigation, a school of thought with a long-term horizon, or a combination of these approaches?

Should we be looking deeper into the Christian tradition, beyond nineteenth and twentieth-century personalist thinkers, to retrieve the wealth of Christian reflection on economic questions, whether it be found in Scripture, the writings of the Church Fathers, or the natural-law tradition of the Protestant and Catholic Scholastics?

How do we communicate the economic personalist synthesis of theological, philosophical, juridical, and economic thought to the Christian community?

How do we bring the insights of the path of economic personalism to the attention of secular thinkers who rely, and in many instances, continue to rely, often unthinkingly, on positivistic visions of mankind?

Each of these questions raises further issues. The history of the Christian Church shows us, however, that they are not new problems. They are questions that ask us to think about how truth is known and how it is communicated. Christians have always reflected on these issues. In his appeal to the “Unknown God” in the Areopagus of Athens (Acts 17:23), and in his reflections on the law written on the hearts of all (Rom. 2:15), the apostle Paul showed us the way to resolve such dilemmas. Likewise, in his later career as a professor in Paris, for example, Thomas Aquinas was asked: How should we settle disputed questions–by reason or by authority? His response remains as relevant now as it was then.

To appeal to reason in our modern world is, of course, a potentially frustrating exercise, given the truncated view of reason that dominates most secular thinking, not to mention the influence of Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault in destroying people's belief that reason opens the way to truth. Nonetheless, those involved in the discipline of economics should be more open than many others to proposals based on reason. Economics does, for example, affirm that people are reasonable and are capable of freely willed acts. Economics does not hold that these facts are true for some people but not for others. They are held to be universally true. The language of economics highlights the fact that the person is an agent who makes choices. Hence, economists generally do not argue that people do not have choices. For these reasons and others, we can say that, as an intellectual discipline, economics does provide us with insights into the truth, while eschewing the relativism and skepticism that mires so much of contemporary culture. One wonders, then, how much more economics would reveal if it is brought into a meaningful conversation with the vision of the human person bequeathed to the world by the God who became man: the Lord Jesus Christ, the unutterable Mystery of Love. Such a conversation is and must be at the center of the project and method of economic personalism.