Easter Day Message: De-Bunking Weak Socialist Exegesis
I’m not going to do any work today, for obvious reasons probably minutely detailed in Canon Law somewhere. Instead, I thought I would offer, as briefly as possible, some exegetical clarifications that Christian Conservatives can make when markets and finance are attacked as immoral and enforced redistribution of wealth is advocated as a genuine response to Christ’s exhortation to charity.
What I’m going to do is to take the two most oft-referenced passages used by agoraphobes (in the etymological sense) to try and claim that Jesus opposed markets. Then I will endeavour to point out a few of the complexities of these passages, or otherwise how an anti-market understanding of them simply ignores the historical or literary context. I apologize in advance for not being able to cite the commentaries that taught me these details when I did my exegesis paper last year. Well, here goes.
1) The famous ‘render’ passage (Luke 20:21-28):
(in which Jesus is asked by Pharisees whether or not Jews ought to pay taxes to Caesar, and replies that one must ‘render unto Caesar what is his, and unto God what is His’)
This is doubly important as it is also used to attack an Augustinian opposition to big government: statists claim that obedience to the laws, whatever they are, is simply ‘rendering unto Caesar’ and so the only proper way to oppose unjust laws is to go through the rigmarole of parliamentary democracy to change laws (that is, impose Christian morality on society using government). Usually, however, it is used to argue that Christ has basically given taxation (the violent collection of money from people living within a certain territory) a Divine Command carte blanche. Its repercussions in terms of doctrine and simply theological attitudes towards government stretch and multiply throughout Thomist theory and beyond.
First, we need to ask ourselves why Jews would object paying taxes to Caesar at all. The uninformed answer is that Jews simply resented being subjected to Roman rule and may have felt that, since Caesar had simply invaded Israel, he had no claim to their loyalty or a portion of the profits of their labour. But there’s more to it than that. Crucially, the wording on a Roman denarius, the coin with Caesar’s profile on it which Jesus holds as he gives the ‘render’ statement, calls Caesar a god. It refers explicitly to the imperial cult, in which Caesar is both ‘lord’ and ‘saviour’, among other divine titles – titles that Jews used for God. For Jews in the first centuries, to use Roman money was to traffic in idolatry and by implication ought to be avoided (more on this later) yet at the same time its use was practically demanded of them under Roman rule.
So the Pharisees’ question isn’t a tricky one because it seeks to expose Jesus as being either a rebel against Roman rule or a collaborator. It is difficult to answer because it represents one outward expression of a major moral dilemma for Jews then: how to refrain from idolatry to the extent that the Law demands, while living under the rule of an empire which relies on idolatry (the imperial cult) as its cohesive force. It is true to say that Jews were exempt from the usual requirements to sacrifice to Caesar: yet Roman understanding of the Law was not so adequate that they were allowed, for example, to pay taxes in their own currency, or keep the imperial cult out of their lives in the many minor ways in which it daily infiltrated the lives of subjects of the empire. It was not the paying of taxes to an external ruler per se that Jews objected to (although they surely objected to paying too much), as can be seen by the same dilemma not arising under the other imperial powers, without imperial cults, that dominated them in the Old Testament. It was the idolatrous violations, if minor, of the rule incurred everyday by living under Roman rule. So when Jesus tells Christians to ‘render unto Caesar what is his’, how should they understand that? If Caesar is an idol then nothing can belong to him.
There is a second problem with the statist interpretation of the ‘render’ passage. The formula of ‘give to X what he/it deserves, and to God what He deserves’ is not unique here: Jesus borrows it from the Old Testament, where the meaning is occasionally explicitly ironic or hostile. In 1 Maccabees, for example, the dying Matathias, at the end of a battle, tells his brother to “pay back the Gentiles in full, and obey the commands of the Law”. So perhaps if what is Caesar’s is his use of violence and striving for temporal power, then the ‘render’ passage is really directly rebellious.
This argument, however, is not majority opinion.
Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees cannot be shown to be an injunction to pay taxes as a service to Caesar equivalent to following the Law as a service to God: Caesar’s role as idol rules out such an understanding. What Jesus’ answer did was allow him to express his dissatisfaction with Roman rule without saying something that could get him mistaken for a political rabble-rouser; and he could make the ambiguity of his answer more acceptable to those worried about the idolatrous implications of following Roman laws and customs by including a reminder that, whatever you did with your denarii, Gods Law was notwithstanding.
The radicalism of Jesus’ social message, and His admonition to turn from worldly concerns, however, extend to political life and what role we accord government. Civitas Dei would be the obvious recommended reading on that whole theme.
None of the details I draw out in this article are intended to show that the converse of the statist interpretations is true (e.g. that tax is bad or shouldn’t be paid) but rather that these interpretations don’t stand up to serious scrutiny. The ‘render’ command can’t be used to show that we are divinely enjoined to pay taxes and obey the law. Attempts to do so may entirely miss the point of the passage.
2) The expulsion of the moneychangers from the Temple (I don’t cite the passage because here the redaction between gospels is relevant)
This is not often used as a proper argument that Jesus was antipathetic towards markets: it wouldn’t hold up if used that way because the Temple-context is obviously central to the passage. Instead, it is appealed to as evidence of a general sentiment – shops make Jesus angry – which is easier to support with a string of irrelevant quotes from the sermon on the mount and so on. There’s anecdotal evidence below of the earnest, if not necessarily effective, way in which this passage is appealed to as evidence of Jesus’ broad dislike of people buying and selling things.
Among the G20 protesters there was a chap dressed up as Jesus bearing a placard with ‘throw the moneylenders out’. Firstly, he had misquoted the gospels. Secondly, I don’t understand how he thought the economy was going to recover without them. Money-lenders serve a necessary purpose in our financial system (as in pretty much any – there’s evidence that Thales bought olive fortunes).
Likewise, the money-changers in the Temple of Israel had a very important function in the Jewish sacrificial cult: Jews could offer money to the temple coffers as a sacrifice, and needed to pay for the animals they intended to sacrifice (hence the livestock salesmen: also a necessary service), but they could not do so using pagan money, stamped as it was with images of idols and bearing profane creeds. So money-changers were needed to trade foreign coinage for the domestic currency. This service became particularly important in the early first century as Jews were returning from a plethora of different nations, bearing different currencies, to sacrifice. Technically, then, there was a market-place in the Temple: but it was there because it was needed for the Temple to work in the way it always had done.
The past tense there is the key. Jesus was going to change the way that God’s people sacrificed to Him: rather than animals in one physical building in the world, the people of Israel, after the Crucifixion, were going to re-present Christ’s sacrifice in their own churches, anywhere, and it would be a complete rather than petitionary sacrifice. John’s gospel makes it explicit that Jesus’ expulsion of the money-changers and livestock salesmen from the temple was a symbol of the impending total renewal of the cultic practices of God’s people (John 2:18-21).
To understand the passage as Jesus accusing necessary cultic service-providers of being “robbers”, implying that money-changing and livestock selling did not belong at the edge of a holy place, carried to its logical conclusions, suggest that not the nature of the Temple cult but rather the extent of the providers’ profit-margins was the issue at stake. Nevertheless, the “den of robbers” accusation that finishes this pericope in Mark (11:17), Luke (19:43) and Matthew (21:13) seems pretty strong and needs consideration.
Mark 11:17: “and he was teaching, saying to them, ‘Hath it not been written — My house a house of prayer shall be called for all the nations, and ye did make it a den of robbers?’” (my italics). Note that ‘the nations’ is the equivalent term for gentiles. The prophetic-symbological interpretation, then, can be maintained here: Jesus is making the distinction between the universality of the future temple cult of the Church and the specificity of the Temple in Jerusalem which has led to its misuse (not necessarily at that very moment) in the history of Israel. So an anti-market interpretation in the Marcan pericope is not necessarily appropriate. Matthew copies Mark’s account almost word-for-word.
Luke 19:43: “saying to them, ‘It hath been written, My house is a house of prayer — but ye made it a den of robbers.’” is much less clearly symbological, although it contains compressed references to the Marcan juxtaposition of universal spiritual future and flawed contingent past. It could be argued that Luke’s redaction of Mark here tones down the prophetic content, perhaps in order to bring out Jesus’ vehemence towards markets. This contention becomes rather strained since Luke places that very redaction immediately after a parable in which a servant gains his master’s praise by successfully investing the master’s money, gaining profit.
The above analysis is, of course, somewhat speculative and quite close to the text: I am an amateur and my conclusions worth little. The attempt to use this passage to paint Jesus as an habitual opponent of trading and capital, however, requires two things: it not only requires (a) that Jesus is specifically throwing traders out of the Temple specifically because they are trading there, but also that (b) he does so vehemently enough that we can infer a negative attitude towards trading per se and not just in the Temple – otherwise the most that the G20 placard-bearer could have been complaining about is, perhaps, that he had to pay for his Catechesis in the church book-shop. If (a) is ambiguous – if not a misunderstanding – then we cannot move to (b).
I’m sorry that took so long. Thank God you don’t have to do it for weekly supervisions! Basically, try to paraphrase the arguments in your head so that the next time a statist tries to claim Jesus would have raised capital gains taxes, you have something to say back besides attacking their party’s anti-clericalism (which never goes down well, and often results in one accidentally defending clause 28 or something equally tasteless). Have a good year!
p.s. last time I tried arguments like this on an evangelical I know in the CSLD he claimed I was ‘intellectualizing’ the gospel. There’s a very easy way to undercut such an approach: ask so-called ‘literalists’ to explain how the words of the Bible teaches the existence of the Holy Trinity. Then watch them squirm.
What about Matthew 19:21?
16 Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?”
17 “Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments.”
18 “Which ones?” the man inquired. Jesus replied, “‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony,
19 honor your father and mother,’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’”
20 “All these I have kept,” the young man said. “What do I still lack?”
21 Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
22 When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth.
23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Or Luke 14:33? “In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.”
I’ll leave the exegesis to Hugh, but it would not be difficult to come up with a host of verses ostensibly favourable towards markets, as well as a set of ostensibly antagonistic verses. What matters is seeing them all in the round, in the grand context of the whole of revelation, and making sense of them that way – which will inevitably result in different analyses. But the Church’s analysis is unambiguously anti-Socialist, if it is not unambiguously pro-capitalist.
I’d direct you to ‘Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy’, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs. The principles of human dignity, solidarity, and subsidiarity advanced by Christ and His Church are not best served by Socialism. In fact Socialism has been repeatedly denounced by Popes:
“In working for a wage he works also for a full and perfect right to use his earnings as seems good to him. If, therefore, a man spends less on consumption and uses what he saves to buy a farm, that farm is his wage in another form, as much at his disposal as was the wage itself. It is precisely in this power of disposal that ownership consists, whether the property be in real estate or in movable goods. It follows that when socialists endeavour to transfer privately owned goods into common ownership they worsen the condition of all wage earners. By taking away from them freedom to dispose of their wages they rob them of all hope and opportunity of increasing their possessions and bettering their condition.” – Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII
“Socialism cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth.” – Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI
“No Catholic can subscribe even to moderate Socialism.” – Mater et Magistra, Pope John XXIII
“Lured…by the greed of present goods…Socialists assail the right of property. While they seem desirous of caring for the needs and satisfying the desires of all men, they strive to seize and hold in common whatever has been acquired either by lawful title, by labour, or by thrift.” – Quod Apostolici Muneris, Pope Leo XIII
I would have to conclude that the message of the Nazorean may be quite loaded against the market. Consider the utility maximization problem Jesus poses to the individuals he confronts. You have two categories of “goods” that the individual can consume, religious goods (X) and secular goods (Y), which can be obtained via time and money expenditure. Thus:
X = X(tx, px)
Y = Y(ty, py)
where ty, py denote the amount of time and money devoted to secular consumption, and tx, px the amount of time and money devoted to religion. Since there are only 24 hours in a day, we can introduce the input constraint
tx + ty + H <= T
where T is total available time and H is hours of work. Since total money expenditure on religious and secular activities cannot exceed an individual’s income, we can also say:
mx + my <= I
where I is total income. Thus, if the wage rate is w and a person has non-earned income of R, total income is:
I = wH + R
Maximum obtainable income, if all the individual’s time were devoted to work, would then be:
Imax = wT + R
The rational consumer will thus seek to maximize:
U(X, Y)
subject to the above constraints. Assuming a standard Cobb-Douglas functional form, our utility function is:
U(X, Y) = X^kY^(1-k)
And our consumption functions are:
X(tx, px) = tx^apx^(1-a)
Y(ty, py) = ty^bpy^(1-b)
All three functions are increasing in both arguments, and exponential in the parameters, meaning a 1% increase in X yields a k% increase in utility. k represents the relative value of religious to secular goods; in other words, religiosity. a represents the relative value of time (over money) devoted to religion (for example, some religions will emphasize church attendance over charitable giving).
Maximizing, we have:
(i) tx* = ak(I*/w)
(ii) px* = (1-a)kI*
(iii) px*/tx* = ((1-a)/a)w
Let’s unpack these results a bit. Note that equation (i) has the term I*/w. Assuming most individuals derive the majority of income from wages, this term equals approximately T. Since T is the same for all individuals, we would expect little relation between income and church attendance (the real world will likely be different from this simplified model, since we know there are opportunity costs). But consider equation (ii). This contains the term I*, which means that as income rises, money expenditure on religious “goods” will rise proportionately. The share of expenditure on religious “goods,” (1-a)k, will then depend on religiosity (k) and the religion’s preference for time or money (a). Thus, the distribution of giving will be highly skewed according to income and, if the passages cited by Mr. Hadlow are anything to go by, skewed upward. Certainly implies that secular consumption and accumulation of wealth would be discouraged, but also, perhaps, suggests an inherent redistributionist tendency?
Of course, this is a very rudimentary model, and would, I am sure, benefit from incorporating further complications.
I just realized I switched terms halfway through; I* = Imax.
I did explain that the article doesn’t argue Jesus is a capitalist or consumerist or anything – the point was to take a couple of the examples used to show Jesus disapproved of markets and approved of taxation, and show that they may not demonstrate such disapproval, thus providing Christian fiscal conservatives with a way of rebutting the use of said examples.
One can be against material consumption and in favour of charity without being politically opposed to market systems. And there is no link between the Render passage and commands to be charitable. A link between this passage and injunctions to disregard material wealth as being important seems obvious – but a belief that money is not for loving doesn’t entail the idea that all taxation should be quietly paid and all laws followed.
If Tyler were aware of the idiosyncracies of Christian soteriology, he might notice that, as far as most of his current disciples understand him, Jesus did not see X as being ‘obtained via time and money expenditure’.
We might want also to ask whether it is harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a flame to burn downwards (Nazianzen on the Incarnation). Christians can’t buy X or work for it because it’s a gift.
Certainly Christianity has a ‘redistributionist’ tendency in that the wealthy are asked to give money away to the poor. That’s not the same thing as governmental redistribution of wealth, though.
Agreed, Hugh. Of the idiosyncrasies of Christian soteriology I am quite aware. My post was actually intended as little more than a tongue-in-cheek swipe at economists’ (myself included) presumption that we can glance quickly at any social or cultural situation, and model it.
Oh sorry! It seemed very long and I was intimidated by the technicality. NMD I’m afraid.