Sunday, July 03, 2011

AN ETHICAL ECONOMY AND GOD’S DIVINE ECONOMY


AN ETHICAL ECONOMY AND GOD’S DIVINE ECONOMY

      When I first proposed conducting an independent study on “Christianity, Capitalism, and the Crash”[1] during the 2010-2011 academic season, I knew I was intrigued, if also intimidated by, the topic. What I did not realize at the time was that although it would be a foray into an area of study I heretofore had avoided, it would become not only a study in the topic of economics and faith, but also an experiment in the method of study in ecclesial contexts. Over the course of the year, I was provided an opportunity to make a presentation with intern pastors and their supervisors on the topic of theological study in the parish, with the “Christianity, Capitalism, and the Crash” syllabus as a test case.[2] In our synodical study group, we dealt with issues of irregular attendance, participants finding it difficult to actually make space in their schedules for the reading and meetings. Furthermore, there was something peculiar or special about theology and economics as an area of study that focused attention on methods in addition to subject. Whenever we would meet, pastors and lay theologians would qualify the conversation, prefacing their remarks by saying, “Well I’m not an economist, but…” or “I’m not an expert, however, I think that…”
            One essay from the syllabus especially highlights the issue. Max L. Stackhouse, in “What Then Shall We Do? On Using Scripture in Economic Ethics,” makes this rather disheartening assertion: “Theological statements and sermons which attempt to spell out contemporary economic applications of biblical texts all too often strike those who study modern economic institutions or policies as journalistic, ideological, or simply misinformed.”[3] I have read and re-read this sentence dozens of times, and I acknowledge the truth of it. It applies not simply to theological statements and sermons spelling out contemporary economic applications of biblical texts. It is also true of theological statements and sermons on a wide array of secular topics, from anthropology to media studies. Stackhouse’s question in the title, then, is apt. “What then shall we do?” Stackhouse’s answer to his own question is, “So far as we are able, we must represent the truth and justice of God, and the best understanding of social life available, constantly clarifying their indirect connections.”[4] I add, that if we are to represent the best understanding of social life available, then pastors ought to study.
            The current global economic crisis presents pastors with the golden opportunity to consider the indirect connections between free-market economies and biblical faith. In the case of economy, engagement is not just an issue of bringing together theology and a “hot topic” of the day. Interestingly, at the center of Trinitarian reflection and Christian faith are questions of economy—God’s divine economy, economic ethics, the nature of Christian desire, and the like. In this paper, I offer a critique and affirmation of the lessons learned through the readings and group discussion. The first portion of the paper will proceed as a narrative, examining two key teachable moments where I gained valuable insight through teaching and discussion—an intern/supervisor retreat lecture and a synod Intentional Theologians study group. In the second portion of the paper, I will take up two topics of special interest examined during the course of the last year. With D. Stephen Long, I will explore what it means to speak of God’s divine economy as a theologian, and with Vincent Miller and William Cavanaugh I will look briefly at what it means to build an ethical economy in a consumer culture, focusing especially on the nature of Christian desire. Throughout, I will pay attention to the way method and content mutually influence one another, illustrating the challenges and opportunities for pastors who seek to be intentionally theological as well as intentionally informed on issues of the day.
                       
Intern-Supervisor Retreat Presentation and Synod Study
For the past few years, after I completed the Pastor-Theologian Program with the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, NJ, I have made use of a syllabus provided by the Center to lead a local Pastor-Theologian study group in our synod.[5] In order to welcome lay theologians into the group, we renamed it the Intentional Theologians group. For the first two years, the Intentional Theologians study topics were formally theological in nature, addressing topics like “Reading the Bible Theologically” and “Theological Anthropology.” Participants tended to be especially interested in biblical study first, then connecting that to intentionally theological inquiry.
      When I announced that the study for 2009-2010 was going to be titled “Christianity, Capitalism, and the Crash,” I had two opposite but interesting responses from potential participants. First, some Intentional Theologians decided to sit out the year because it was not as centered on biblical study and traditional theology. They promised to be back if we returned to more traditional topics. However, another and very passionate group signed up for the year, perhaps precipitated by the sudden surge of interest in all things economic after the Great Recession of 2008-2009.
      However, when it came time to actually begin study of the topic, slightly less than half of those who had signed up to participate actually attended the first few gatherings. For the most part, participants did not indicate lack of interest in the topic. Instead, they named busy schedules and timing as more of an issue. However, even those of us who committed to participating in the meetings felt less energetic and confident in our participation in the days of study than we had in previous years. This lack of confidence I believe was precipitated by the (ad)venture of stepping out into a topic that was less connected to the disciplines that traditionally inform pastoral ministry. I imagine it would be possible that a study group looking at biology and theology, or math and theology, might encounter similar challenges.[6]
      Then, when it came time to actually hold conversations, the tone and nature of our discussions also differed from previous years. In addition to the aforementioned lack of confidence, it simply seemed like the group (myself included) was simply less articulate. Of course it took us some time to get our heads around books like The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers. That was an expedition into philosophical inquiry some of us had never made, or had made many years ago, while in college in a course in economic theory. However, even our own language about economics from a theological perspective lacked the kind of crisp attention to nuance, breadth of vocabulary, and clear thinking that had marked previous year’s discussions. When we turned, for example, to a study of Reforming the Morality of Usury, it was not simply that we had not considered usury as an issue in theological ethics; it was that we had not even studied tools that would give us traction into a discussion of that area of inquiry from any direction whatsoever.
      By late October, I was sufficiently intrigued by our struggles to want to take a discussion of the issue to another venue. A gathering of intern pastors and their supervisors was the perfect context, because it would be a group of people intentionally engaged in the act of both living and serving as pastors and engaging in critical reflection on the interplay between pastoral ministry and theology. So I designed a presentation, “Theology and Economy: Some Notes and Questions for Conversation,”[7] sent out a link for the Max Stackhouse essay, “What Then Shall We Do? On Using Scripture in Economic Ethics,” and prepared to host a conversation.
      I have never led such a heated discussion on the nature of study and pastoral ministry in my entire life. What especially caught me by surprise was the extremely negative reaction many in the group had to the Stackhouse essay. Many readers perceived (rightly) that Stackhouse comes out of a particular, neo-conservative tradition (which I will outline further in the next section of this paper) that sees considerable compatibility between Christian faith and global capitalism. Stackhouse assumes that theologians can indeed discover trans-contextual norms in Scripture that can speak to the various global and local contexts of the modern world. At various points in the essay, he offers simple lists of examples, like care for the poor, working for just social institutions, stewarding God’s creation, or do not lie, steal, cheat, or covet.[8] Interestingly, many interns and supervisors in the group had been influenced enough by the radical hermeneuts of suspicion (especially Foucault), to argue that it is dubious to make claims for trans-contextual norms at all. Second, some in the group thought Stackhouse too quickly identified the work of biblical theology with the development of globalization. Almost everyone who spoke up during the discussion found considerable fault with Stackhouse. This indicates, I imagine, a lot about what specific traditions have formed the average Lutheran pastor and seminarian, and therefore how they respond to a theologian like Stackhouse, who is working firmly in the dominant tradition (again, outlined in more detail in the next section).
      The other heated line of inquiry, however, had to do with whether pastors needed to study, and how much. Stackhouse, early in his essay, argues that the work of a biblical theologian “requires an understanding of social contexts which is at least as complex as the hermeneutics of texts—in part because modern social contexts have already been influenced by the ways in which biblical motifs have been wedded to philosophical themes, social institutions, and economic interests over the course of two thousand years.”[9] In other words, pastors and theologians need to be studying the social sciences as much as they study historical-criticism and other approaches to the biblical text itself. This can sound daunting, and given all the demands on the time of the average pastor, is no small expectation.
      However, if we concede Stackhouse’s point—that “every pastor must ask again whether it is possible to identify any basic ‘message’ to offer to the contexts of the world…it is unlikely that we can simply repeat previous responses; and it is unlikely to help the situation if we jump to merely contextual solutions”[10]—then there is no way around careful and sustained study as integral to the work of a pastor, because pastors are called to know and understand the message of the scriptures, the contexts in which they live, and effective and creative methods of relating the two. Obviously, each Intentional Theologian will need to make decisions about how much time they will devote to any given area of inquiry. However, what is of primary importance to remember is that once a theologian has decided to write or speak in any context on a given topic, they ought to be as informed as possible. And one of the primary ways they ought to be informed is to be able to situate what they are teaching or preaching in the larger context of discourse on that topic. In order to practice what I am preaching here, I now to turn to exactly this form of inquiry.

Three Ways of Speaking About God’s Divine Economy
      Sometimes the most useful resource for inquiry is not the presentation of a supposedly new proposal, but rather the laying out of a grid that helps readers assess various proposals in light of one another. D. Stephen Long’s Divine Economy: Theology and the Market is a book of the second sort. Although he also in the end offers a new constructive analysis, the book has been formative in my own learning primarily because it has offered a grid for understanding where precisely my reflections on theology and the market fit within a broader framework.
      If I were to conduct a genealogical analysis of my own systems of thought, I would say I was formed as a youth and young adult in what Long calls the “dominant tradition.” This dominant tradition, influenced especially by Weberian social analysis and Niebuhrian realism, is grounded in an anthropology of liberty and focuses on a theology of creation and the creative potential of humans.[11] Although sin limits human potential to accomplish the good, nevertheless it is our human liberty and freedom that is the primary theological analogy for who God is in relation to human creativity. So our economic choices are shaped and informed by this focus on creation and human liberty. I was raised on a successful farm, and saw this theology lived out in our business and economic practices. My grandfather was a Republican politician in the Iowa House of Representatives, and I saw this theological tradition deeply inform his sensibilities as a politician as well.
      For many years I subscribed to something like this tradition, and I still see value in it. It tends toward the utilitarian and realistic, what will work, and it is very successful at engaging the world as it is. When I read neo-conservative theologians who continue to work in this vein, such as Max Stackhouse or Michael Novak, I still have deep sympathies with the very practical implications of their way of thinking. However, I also have gone through a stage in my thinking very similar to the one outlined by D. Stephen Long in Part II of his book on the “emergent tradition” that critiques the dominant tradition. In college, I had my first exposure to liberation theology, especially while reading Gordon Kaufman’s In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology in a faculty-student reading group. Where Stackhouse and Novak tend to follow Weberian social analysis, the liberation theologians go the way of Karl Marx. Long in his book takes time to analyze Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gustavo Guttiérez, Jon Sobrino, and James Cone as representatives of the emergent tradition. I read all of these theologians voraciously while in seminary and during my first few years of ministry. There was a very deep place within me that wanted to rebel against the dominant tradition in which I had been raised, and this emergent tradition connected easily with that tendency.
      Theologians in the emergent tradition deny that there can be any kind of rapprochement between Christianity and capitalism, and instead look to some form of socialism as the way forward.[12] Their focus, which they learned from Marx himself, is “critical reflection on praxis.”[13] Where the dominant tradition tends towards theologies of creation, the emergent tradition drifts towards eschatology and kingdom of God theologies. It does so as a natural corrective to the dominant tradition. The focus shifts to liberation and ethics, and this, rather than liberty, becomes the decisive resource for knowledge of God in the emergent tradition.[14]
      I tended towards the emergent tradition because of growing outrage at the injustices inherent in almost all capitalist systems I had observed. The dominant tradition tends to inadequately address these injustices, or simply to assume that the gradual outworking and success of the global capitalist system will itself address them naturally, as a matter of course, or even that the current drift towards a global “free” world is the natural outworking of Christianity on a global scale. As a seminary student traveling to impoverished neighborhoods and communities, I did not observe this to be the case, and I had the growing sense that I needed to be more active in bringing about the kingdom of God on earth through direct revolutionary social action. A part of me still tends in this direction.
      However, although the revolutionary implications of the liberation school and the emergent tradition appeal to me, D. Stephen Long’s concern that the dominant tradition results “in a subordination of Christology and ecclesiology to a doctrine of creation,” is the central concern that has brought me along and through both the dominant and emergent traditions to a place much closer to his final “residual tradition.”[15] Similarly, although the emergent tradition does offer more in the way of an ecclesiology than the dominant tradition (globalization IS the ecclesiology of the dominant tradition), Christology and ecclesiology are subordinated in the emergent tradition just as much as in the dominant one, only this time by eschatology and metaphysics.[16] The dominant tradition, in the end, tends to be a “non-confessional theology [that] has the same shape as the formal, but contentless, character of global capitalism.”[17] This is a withering, but I believe accurate, description of the problems with the dominant tradition. I remember reading a book by Max Stackhouse a few years ago and thinking, “Ok, I like a lot of what he says in this book, but is he Christian?” Whatever direction theology and economics goes as they inter-relate, Christians need to keep the conversation Christocentric, and not drift off into abstracted and contentless forms of theology divorced from Christ as Lord of the church.
      To bring my genealogy up to the present time, my move into more of what Long titles the “residual tradition” came about through close reading of Alasdair MacIntyre, John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, William Cavanaugh, Walter Brueggemann, Ellen Davis, and Wendell Berry, among others. Thus far in the world of academic discourse, I have seen this new residual tradition called radical orthodoxy, virtue ethics, new agrarianism, or even, not without warrant, biblical theology. Again, as in the previous two traditions, Long offers helpful analysis of what precisely constitutes the residual tradition. In this case, Long makes no less of a claim than to say that it is the residual tradition that is the only tradition that does not concede the place for theology as the queen of the sciences. Theology itself is “constitutive of the real.”[18] Which is to say that theological descriptions of reality are as important as economic ones. This begins to help articulate at least one way pastors and theologians can regain confidence about their ability to speak of matters economic. If theology itself is constitutive of the real, then theology has something real and very important to say about economic life. We do not and cannot leave this simply to the economists
      However, the residual tradition goes further. Where the dominant tradition focuses on utility, and the emergent traditions focuses on change,[19] the residual tradition retrieves a focus on the good, the true, and the beautiful.[20] Instead of focusing on Weber or Marx as a starting point, it looks (typically) back to Thomas Aquinas. Long offers in the final section of his book analysis of this residual tradition in Roman Catholic social teaching, as well as the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre (the good), Bernard Dempsey’s theological economics (the true), and John Milbank’s poetic Christology (the beautiful).[21] Ultimately, this retrieval of the residual tradition is itself a call to liberty, and is revolutionary in tone, especially because it calls into question the assumptions of modernity by returning to the rationality of Aquinas. But it does so primarily by setting up an ecclesiology grounded in a natural Christology, the result of which is a proposal for human creativity and making “which participates in the divine simultaneity of act and power.”[22]
      Having come to this point in my theological genealogy, I admit to finding myself stuck, or at least sticky. None of these traditions, with the possible exception of Niebuhr, adheres to the social ethics of Lutheranism as I have typically understood them. What this means is that each time I have lived with or in one of the traditions (dominant, emergent, or residual), I have lived with small points of contact with the Lutheran tradition but not with a strong sense of how they connect. It is my strong desire as a pastor and Christian to live into Long’s grand vision: “A good theological performance of the relationship between theology and economy will give the church and the market their appropriate roles.”[23] The question remains, “How?”
      That being said, there are enough points of contact between these three traditions and various branches of Lutheranism that I am beginning to find my way. First, I do think Lutherans, in their commitment to place or even ethnic heritage, embody Long’s contention that the residual tradition identifies “the task of the church is to produce countless alternatives to the marginalist domination of rationality by interests. The theological task is the proliferation of a complex space.”[24] Lutherans do this, at least to a certain extent, somewhat habitually. We have fair trade coffee cooperatives, a social service organization that encourages local sustainability (www.lwr.org), and local congregations that, through pure commitment to being authentically who they are in their particular place, fail to take on the trappings of globalization.
      Long concludes by arguing that “our lives are to be understood in terms primarily of a mission that takes its form from the beauty of Christ’s mission… theological economics begins with the church; but it also must give itself for the world.” This seems exactly right to me. It is very similar to the mission statement of our denomination: “Marked with the cross of Christ forever, we are claimed, gathered, and sent for the sake of the world.[25] Part of our mission of taking the form of Christ’s mission in the world is our learning how to desire, and what to desire. As Long concludes, “To teach us to desire the infinite with an infinite desire and the finite with a finite desire—that is the mission of the theologian and the role of the church. To teach us to desire… that is the role of the contemporary market.”[26] Since it is especially the learning of how properly to desire that is the work of the theologian and the church, I will conclude this essay with reflections on an ethical economy in a consumer culture.

An Ethical Economy in a Consumer Culture
      Both Vincent J. Miller and William Cavanaugh in their recent books on consumerism and religion lock in on desire as perhaps the crucial category to address consumerism from a Christian perspective. Cavanaugh makes it the subtitle of his book, Economics and Christian Desire[27], and Miller devotes two full chapters to religious and consumer desires.[28] Why a focus on desire rather than consumption? Because it is the desire for things, rather than the consumption of them, that is at root in a theological analysis. Cavanaugh notes, for example:“It is not the desire for any one thing in particular, but the pleasure of stoking desire itself, that makes malls into the new cathedrals of Western culture.”[29] It is not because we are attached to any one thing that causes a consumerist mentality, but rather that we are detached from everything and only fulfilled in the endless consuming of things, moving from one thing to another, that is the mark of consumerist culture. So rightly re-ordering desires is the crucial theological consideration.
      For Cavanaugh specifically, desire rightly ordered has to do with a more Augustinian account of the will and human desire. “Freedom is being wrapped up in the will of God, who is the condition of human freedom.”[30] A supposedly “free” market gives us the illusion that we freely choose to consume this or that thing. However, according to Augustine, “desire is a complex… network of movement that does not simply originate within the individual self but pulls and pushes the self in different directions from both inside and outside the person.”[31] This being the case, freedom in our culture is typically misunderstood as freedom from rather than freedom for. “Freedom in fact depends not on the autonomy of the will but on the end to which the will is moved.”[32]
      Freedom in this sense is more like free participation in something larger, rather than autonomous (and illusory) freedom from any or all contexts. This true freedom of the will is epitomized for Cavanaugh in the Eucharist, the meal we consume that consumes us. “The consumer of the Eucharist is resistant to such appropriation, however, because the consumer of the Eucharist is taken up into a larger body, the body of Christ.”[33] Furthermore, as in the previous section, where we noted that D. Stephen Long understood participation in Christ to lead to mission for the world, so too participation in the Eucharist leads to self-giving. “If in consuming the Eucharist we become the body of Christ, then we are called, in turn, to offer ourselves to be consumed by the world.”[34] Because Cavanaugh turns the terms around on themselves and focuses on the abundance of Christ rather than the constant scarcity of the next consumer good to be desired, we can see how his method and theology function solidly within the residual tradition, abandoning the modernist modes of thought and instead retrieving Augustinian and Thomist forms of rationality. Furthermore, theological discourse becomes the defining mode of speaking of the world. Theology becomes the real. Participation in Christ becomes the deeper reality in which we participate.
      Vincent J. Miller, thought a Roman Catholic like Cavanaugh, comes at the issue of consumerism and desire a bit more from the context of the emergent rather than the residual tradition identified through our reading of Long. Chapter 2, the core of his analysis, is grounded in a reading of Karl Marx.[35] However, although Miller is much more influenced by the emergent, Marxist informed categories, he also shifts to the theological discourse at a “meta-“ level. “A theological response to [problems of consumer religion] must move beyond the level of meaning to address the structures and practices through which meanings are engaged.”[36]
      One example of how meanings are engaged is Miller’s chapter on “Desire and the Kingdom of God,” where he notes that “consumer society ‘is simply desiring society.’”[37] What capitalist society delivers is not goods per se, but rather “sophisticated systems for forming and inciting desire.”[38] This is an incredibly important insight. Typically, inordinate attachment to material goods is laid at the feet of a consumerist society. However, for a truly consumerist society to flourish (according to its own standards), inciting continued detachment from goods is just as important as inciting attachment. If you like your new Bruce Springsteen CD so much that all you do is listen to it over and over again for years, you will not be heading out to buy the new CDs that are coming out next week. In order to consume, we need to be in a constant flux of attaching and detaching. “’High-consumption lifestyles’ individuals become increasingly indifferent to particular wants and objects of consumption because of the increased amount of time ‘expended on the total activity of consumption.’”[39]
      Because this is the case, Miller goes on to note that consumerist desire is not completely at odds with desire from a Christian perspective, but it is off track.[40] Furthermore, it is all the more dangerous for being off track rather than a head-on train collision. Consumer desire’s “very insatiability is driven by the fact that it exploits more profound longings.”[41] Our hearts are restless until we find ourselves in God, but what if the end to restlessness is no longer desired? Miller warns that the danger of consumer culture—since it is the endless wanting itself that is the end and goal of consumerism—becomes a corruption of rightly ordered desire for God and God’s kingdom. “The ultimate goal of the spiritual quest for union with God, where all desire and anticipation cease in their absolute fulfillment, seems strangely unattractive. It sounds, dare we say, boring.”[42] As a result, the similarity between our desire for God and consumer desire is dangerous precisely because, inasmuch as we are formed and indoctrinated into consumer desire, we lose our sense of desire for the transcendence of God.[43]
      Let us stop here, and see where close study of Miller and Cavanaugh have brought us. As a Pastor-Theologian, it is very likely that I would preach on consumerism at some point during the church year, given the strength of the consumerist culture in which we live. Prior to reading Miller, I would have likely misunderstood consumerist desire, as a shallow attachment to things. However, by walking with Miller through the anatomy of consumer and religious desire, I have now come to a more nuanced sense of the importance of the relationship between consumer desire and Christian desire. Specifically, I am now aware why, when I preach about fulfillment and resting in God, I sometimes get blank stares or a less than energetic response. It is not because I have been misunderstood. It is because I have been understood, but the message has been found wanting. Life with God that involves the end of desire lacks appeal, at least for hearers who have been formed their whole lives in a consumer society.
      It would be interesting to ask, for example, whether people hope there are shopping malls in heaven. According to Miller’s analysis, people would hope there are malls, but not just to acquire goods. A mall is appealing in heaven because it allows the continual anticipation of and hoping for the acquiring of goods, endlessly. Preaching, then, in order to have traction in that context, would need to think carefully through what the biblical witness has to say about fulfillment in God. Is life in God the end of desire, the end of hope, the end of anticipation? Or is it a grander vision than that, so that the desire enjoyed in the beatific vision before God is both fulfilled and fulfilled precisely in its continuation? Miller quotes Gregory of Nyssa at the beginning of his chapter on “Desire and the Kingdom of God”: “Never to reach satiety of desiring is truly to see God.”[44] When I first read that sentence before reading Miller’s chapter, I actually had very little idea what it meant, or how to understand it. Now, having been exposed, I cannot get enough of it. Even theological inquiry itself can participate in this kind of Christian desire, so that never to reach satiety of theological insight is truly to see God.
Bibliography

Cavanaugh, William T., Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Eerdmans,
      2008).

Heilbroner, Robert L. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the
      Great Economic Thinkers. Touchton, 1999.

Long, D. Stephen. Divine Economy: Theology and the Market. Routledge, 2000.

Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer
      Culture. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Stackhouse, Max L. “What Then Shall We Do? On Using Scripture in Economic Ethics.”
      Interpretation 41 (October 1987): 382-397.
Appendix 1
Attach the Mammon in the Maelstrom syllabus
Appendix 2
            Attach the discussion outline for the intern/supervisor retreat


[1] A syllabus of study for Pastor-Theologians developed by Wallace Alston, former director of the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, New Jersey, see Appendix 1.

[2] See Appendix 2 for an outline of this presentation.
[3] Max Stackhouse, “What Then Shall We Do? On Using Scripture in Economic Ethics,” Interpretation 41 (October 1987), 382.

[4] Ibid. 397.
[5] See Appendix 1 for a copy of the syllabus.
[6] Are there even groups of clergy who gather to study biology and theology or math and theology? I would love to find out.
[7] See Appendix 2 for a copy of the presentation outline.

[8] Stackhouse, 395.
[9] Ibid. 390.

[10] Ibid. 389.
[11] D. Stephen Long. Divine Economy: Theology and the Market (Routledge, 2000), 71.
[12] D. Stephen Long, 84.

[13] Ibid. 86.

[14] Ibid. 172.
[15] Ibid. 12.

[16] Ibid. 118.

[17] Ibid.  55.
[18] Ibid. 177.

[19] Karl Marx, in his Theses on Feuerbach, famously remarked, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theses_on_Feuerbach

[20] D. Stephen Long, 178.

[21] Ibid., 180-181.
[22] Ibid. 181.

[23] Ibid. 262.

[24] Ibid.  269.
[26] D. Stephen Long, 270.

[27] William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Eerdmans, 2008).
[28] Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York: Continuum, 2004), Chapters 3 and 4.

[29] Cavanaugh, 91.

[30] Ibid. 8.

[31] Ibid. 9.

[32] Ibid. 11.
[33] Ibid. 54.

[34] Ibid. 84.

[35] Miller, 3.
[36] Ibid. 6.

[37] Ibid. 107.

[38] Ibid. 107.

[39] Ibid. 121.

[40] Ibid. 108.
[41] Ibid. 126.

[42] Ibid. 129.

[43] Ibid. 130.
[44] Ibid. 107.

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