Divine Economy: Theology and the Market

To make the transition from the issue of lending in general to usury in particular, Aquinas asks which type of good money is. In his day the answer was simple: Money was like the bottle of wine. If you wanted to borrow four gold coins from me, I would take them out of my money chest and lend them to you. A week or a month or a year later, you would bring back those four coins (or, more likely, four equivalent gold coins if you had spent the originals) and I would put them back in my supply. Money was described as "sterile" like the wine, because it was not a productive asset the way a house would be.

The reason almost all modern Christians have changed their view of usury is that in the modern world we regard money as like the house, not the wine. Money is a claim on assets, and such a claim is indeed productive, whether I have temporary use of it for a year or, in these days of money-market funds, even for 24 hours.

The original biblical prohibition against usury was intimately tied to concern for the poor, because most borrowing in an agricultural society occurred out of desperation. Aquinas, however, dealt with the concerns of poverty through his doctrine of property, while his usury prohibition was based on a wholly different argument. If Aquinas were alive today, he could maintain his usury theory intact and come to a different conclusion: that interest on a money loan can be perfectly moral. Long seems to have overlooked this fundamental argument of Aquinas, and as a result claims that Aquinas's analyses of usury and property require the insights of revelation to complete them.

In the most general sense, of course, Aquinas stresses that all of human knowing and living requires a relation to God in faith for its ultimate completion. But Aquinas's treatment of these concrete economic problems without using insights from revelation indicates that Long has badly overstated his case.

The outcome of all of this is that, unlike Long, Dempsey and most other modern Christians understand social science as separate from but complementary to theology. Though the social sciences did not exist in the pre-modern world, their appearance as independent inquiries is a reasonable development within the tradition of natural-law ethics. Long wants to employ the perspective of Aquinas but demote the natural law, which is like trying to be a Lutheran without relying on the Bible.

LIKE HAUERWAS, Long holds out little hope that the structures of the contemporary world can be transformed into anything approaching an acceptable outcome. This leads to a view of the church that will appear sectarian to most other Christians. However, members of the radical orthodoxy movement resist that label. They see the living out of a faithful life in the church as potentially transformative in the sense that others will--it is hoped--take notice of this attractive alternative and be drawn to it. According to Long, the church should "re-present in history a form of life that is good, true, and beautiful"--something he's sure the world has given up on.