Economy as Most Prevalant Idol

"One could see Johns Howard Yoder’s and Hauerwas’s analyses largely working within a paradigm in which the state is the looming idol that the church is most tempted to worship. But Bell suggests that this is a dated and therefore somewhat impotent mode of analysis and critique, for in a globalized world it is no longer states that wield imperialist power but rather capitalism and the market." (p. 248)

"Every aspect of society – schools, athletics, even the church – must insert itself in the capitalist machine. Capitalism, then, is the new empire the gospel must oppose because it demands an allegiance that rivals allegiance to Christ." (p. 249)

"‘The conflict between capitalism and Christianity is nothing less than a clash of opposing technologies of desire,’ for each is trying to form very different people for very different ends.’ (Bell, LTAEH, 2)" (Book is Liberation Theology After the End of History, quoted in Smith)

James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy

Freedom & Equality: Opposite Ends of The Enlightenment Stick

"Both capitalism and socialism draw strength from a vision of human life, and this vision sustains them in face of their failures. For capitalism it is the vision of freedom - the freedom of the individual person to develop his own powers, to achieve the greatest success he is capable of and to enjoy the fruit of his achievement. For socialism it is the vision of equality. ... Both derive from the Enlightenment vision of human beings as autonomous individuals with innate and equal rights to pursue self-chosen ends to the limit of their powers. Each ideology can accuse the other of violating a faith they both hold by the denial of freedom on the one side and by the denial of equality on the other. ... The breakdown of relationships will destroy freedom and will destroy equality, but neither of these will be achieved by being sought for itself. True freedom is not found by seeking to develop the powers of the self without limit, for the human person is not made for autonomy but for true relatedness in love and obedience; and this also entails the acceptance of limits as a necessary part of what it means to be human."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 118-119 (emphasis mine)

The Guidance Capitalism Needs

"To say that capitalism requires a certain kind of moral foundation is to say that capitalism cannot survive permanently in a purely secular society. To quote a recent writer, 'The disinterested devotion which was vital to the creation of the capitalist world order and to the public life of industrial nations and whic rested on a religious idea-system appears as a type of moral capital debt which is no longer being serviced.' ... If capitalism depends on the insights of a moral conscience, then that conscience has to have authority over the working of capitalist economics. ... The conscience that is required to keep capitalism going has no ontological basis. It is a carry-over from an earlier world view."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 112 (emphasis mine)

The interior quote is B. Wilson, quoted in Habgood, Church and Nation in a Secular Age p. 47

Capitalism's Idolatrous Gods

"Traditional Christian ethics had attacked covetousness as a deadly sin, and Paul had equated it with idolatry: the putting of something that is not God in the place belonging to God (Col. 3:5). The eighteenth century, by a remarkable inversion, found in covetousness not only a law of nature but the engine of progress by which the purpose of nature and nature's God was to be carried out."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 109

Theology, Queen of Economics

"Neither for Luther nor for Calvin would it have appeared as anything other than incomprehensible blasphemy to suggest that human behavior in the sphere of economics was outside the jurisdiction of theology. On the contrary, buying and selling, hiring labor and working for a master, amassing wealth and enclosing land - these are precisely the human activities in greatest need of the reminder that every man stands under the law of God and will be accountable to God for his treatment of his neighbor."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 107

Market Economics and Division of Labor

"As the principle of the division of labor gained ascendency, the market moved into the central place as the mechanism that linked all the separate procedures with each other and with consumers. The modern science of economics was born. Once again teleology was removed, because economics was no longer part of ethics. It was not concerned with the purpose of human life. ... What does not enter the market is ignored. Gross National Product referes only to what enters the market. It excludes the work of the housewife, of the gardener growing his own food. .. Two further consequences follow. One is the removal of work from the home to the factory, with immense consequences for the nature of society. The home is no longer the unit of work, and the family is no longer the working unit. The way is opened for a deep divide between the public world of work, of exchange, of economics, and the private world that is withdrawn from the world of work and remains under another vision of how things are. In the public world the workers in the factory are related to each other anonymousely as units in a mechanical process. They are replaceable parts."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 30-31