The following is an excerpt from Faithful Exchange by David Opderbeck. It’s a featured Speakeasy selection, and there are still limited review copies available for qualified reviewers.
I am writing this book on a computer. The basic parts of a computer include the case, motherboard, CPU, power supply, graphics card, RAM, storage, and peripherals, including at least a monitor, keyboard, and mouse or touchpad. Each of these parts, in turn, consists of many individual components. A motherboard, for example, consists of over twenty-five components, including the printed circuit board, switches and jumpers, power supply and other connectors, and peripheral ports. Each of those components, in turn, is composed of multiple individual parts. The voltage regulator circuit on a motherboard, continuing the string of examples, includes chokes (small coils made of iron or ferrite), transistors, and electrolytic capacitors. These components also consist of multiple parts.
A common type of transistor used in this circuit is the metal-oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET). MOSFETs are based on a silicone or silicon-germanium semiconductor, involving a layer of silicone dioxide grown on a silicon substrate, such as polycrystalline silicone, by thermal oxidation. The circuit is etched using photolithography and other techniques necessary for subwavelength (i.e., less than the wavelength of light used for photolithography) elements. Silicon is made from silica sand, much of which is derived from quartz rock mined from one mining district in North Carolina.
This description, from motherboard to voltage regulator circuit to MOSFET chip to quartz rock from North Carolina, could be echoed tens of thousands of times over for all the varied components of the computer. It could be extended deeper into the supply chains for these components to include the equipment used to make the components—for example, the industrial sand-making machines used to transform quartz into sand, constructed of various metals and plastics and controlled by their own computer chips, or the trucks used to transport sand from processors to silicon suppliers.3 Legions of people, working with materials from all over the world, had a hand in making this magic box called a computer that sits under my desk and enables me to write this book.
And that is not all. Every one of the technologies that make this machine work, from subwavelength lithography to physical chokes to plastics composition to mining devices to trucks engines to tens of millions of lines of software code and beyond—all this human ingenuity embodies scientific and mechanical traditions extended over time and protected by different forms of intangible intellectual property, including patents, trade secrets, and copyrights.
And that is not yet all. The multitude of individuals engaged in the activities required for the computer to appear under my desk required some kind of coordination. Managers, accountants, logistics planners, human resource professionals—even lawyers—connected these activities together.
And that is still not yet all. The mining devices, trucks, etching machines, and the like cost time and money to build; the tens of thousands of individuals who contributed physical and intellectual labor toward the fabrication and coordination of these components had to be housed, fed, and cared for; the communications and transportation networks that facilitated these activities had to be constructed and maintained; and so on.
Someone had to supply the resources needed to make all this happen. In the modern world, this means financial capital—in other words, money. This involves different mixtures of bank loans, funds raised on capital markets, private funds and individual investors, and government funds raised through taxes and regulatory levies.
Without everything described above—and much, much more—I could not be writing this book and you could not be reading it. At least, I could not write and you could not read in ways to which we have become accustomed. Maybe I could use a manual typewriter or write physical copies longhand and send them to a physical typesetter using a vintage movable type press, as my scholarly predecessors did from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries. Or I could write on parchment or vellum for artisans, monks, and scribes to copy into woodcut print blocks, codices, or scrolls, as in the centuries before movable type was invented. Even in those cases, raw materials such as mineral dyes for ink, skins for vellum, or papyrus for parchment were harvested and transformed through networks of human intellectual and physical labor. T here is no escaping some form of economy, with requirements for human and material capital and abstract structures of exchange such as money and credit. More importantly, neither I as writer nor you as reader likely would want literature and scholarship to return to the limits of preindustrial times, much less to the Middle Ages or antiquity.
Multiply this one small example millions of times over, into every niche of life—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, communication, leisure, entertainment, health care, education, security, and more. The size, pace, and complexity of contemporary economies are incomprehensibly vast.
A constructive theology of economics must account for this scale and complexity. It is easy to observe theological and moral problems with capitalism. It is much, much harder to offer serious alternative proposals for how the swarming hive of human activity should be coordinated. The alternatives that have been tried on a grand scale in the modern era—fascism and Soviet and Chinese communism—are not anything any sane person would want to emulate, not only because state planning failed practically, but more importantly because it entailed massive surveillance and violence.
The examples of fascism and Soviet and Chinese communism suggest why private property and private markets are historically connected to modern concepts of fundamental human rights. A serious constructive theology of economics must consider the close connection between economic systems, human rights, and political freedoms. These connections run very deep in Western legal systems.
Private property rights existed under Roman law, although the extent to which this could include rights in land is debated. As the Roman era gave way to the feudal systems of medieval Europe, land ownership was concentrated in the nobility, church, and monasteries, while common people possessed some common-use rights. In some places, growing merchant classes were able to obtain interests in lands and homes. Wealthy merchant city-states, including Venice and Florence, also began to break down feudal systems.
The Reformation accelerated these movements away from feudalism. This was perhaps most notably the case in the English Reformation, including its history through the English Civil War. English jurisprudence came to view private property rights as essential to civil liberties that provided a hedge against tyranny. T he Enlightenment’s English political philosophers who provided the foundations for modern Anglo-American property laws and economic systems—John Stuart Mill, John Locke, and Adam Smith—wrote in dialogue with this deep common-law backdrop.
My private property rights in my home and computer protect me against physical interference from governmental or ecclesiastical authorities as I write, and similarly, your private property rights in your residence and in your copy of this book protect you as you read. My private property (or quasiproperty) right in the copyrights to my writing provides me with some control over the distribution and integrity of my work. Closely connected to private property rights, as an American citizen, are my rights against unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution that protect my privacy against excessive government surveillance over my writing and that also protect your privacy in your reading. Similarly—less tied to private property rights but connected to the sense that every citizen enjoys a zone of autonomy from outside interference, the First Amendment to the US Constitution ensures that I have freedoms of speech and religion that allow me to write and you to read without threat of legal sanction from any governmental or ecclesiastical authority.
These kinds of legal protections for ordinary people to write, read, think, assemble, believe, and worship did not always exist throughout human history and do not exist in many parts of the world today. In their modern form, as we know them from historic documents including the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the US Constitution) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they are closely tied to private property rights and capitalism. The Bill of Rights reflects both the American colonial experience under British rule and deeper themes from the history of earlier conflicts of England, from the Magna Carta through the English Civil Wars. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948 in the wake of World War II, responded to the fascisms of Hitler and Mussolini. To unwind private property and capitalism is to threaten to unwind these hard-won rights and freedoms.
The story I have just told of how capitalism and property rights relate to democratic constitutional governance and human rights—the story of modern classical liberalism—is important and true, but incomplete. Other narratives describe how capitalism and democratic constitutional governance arose through theft and wrongful exclusion. In America, this story begins with the displacement of native people by European colonial settlers.
I am writing this book in my home office in a northern New Jersey suburb of New York City. Part of my home was once a carriage house or barn, built around 1890. When my wife and I purchased the property in 1994, we obtained a standard title insurance policy that traced the chain of title through several owners back to the early 1970s. This was sufficient to establish a legally clear title based on the statute of limitations for potential challenges—all standard practice. My property rights in the space from which I am writing, therefore, are legally established through a chain of title dating back a little over forty years. What happened before then?
When we renovated the home in the early 2000s, we found old newspapers stuffed into the walls as insulation, along with a cache of job application rejection letters, all dating to the 1930s. By reading those terse job rejection letters dumped into the wall, I learned a little bit about the apparently sad and lonely Dutchman who lived in the house at the time. I know he was a Dutchman because of his last name but also because this part of northern New Jersey was settled by Dutch immigrants starting in the early seventeenth century. Our little town was known for Dutch families and institutions, including the Dutch reformed churches that had been here for many generations.
I do not have records to know when my property was first converted into a residence, but old town survey maps show that in the nineteenth century, the land on which my home sits was part of a small farm. The farm was one of many parcels divided and subdivided from an original land grant by the English Duke of York to Sir William Carteret in 1664. In the early 1600s, the Dutch East India Company had explored and settled the area. York had received grants from the English king Charles II—the monarch of the restoration period—as part of Charles’s efforts to claim the area for England against the Dutch, which ultimately proved successful.
The original motives of the Dutch flowed from the seventeenth-century mercantilist capitalism movement. Prior to the Dutch and English settlement, these lands were the territory of a native American people, the Munsee, a subdivision of the Leni Lenape. The Dutch and Lenape fell into conflict, resulting in Dutch military victories and harsh treaty terms. When the English moved into the area, they routed the Dutch, resulting in a transfer of the colonial lands from the Dutch to the English in 1664. The Lenape then agreed to treaty terms with the English. The land from which I write, therefore, is ancestral land of the Lenape people, taken from them violently by the Dutch and acquired violently from the Dutch by the English.
The kind of land acknowledgment I make here has become a practice in some settings in recognition of American colonial history. No American landowner, apart from some descendants of native peoples, has completely clean hands. Nearly all contemporary real property titles in America ultimately derive from violent or fraudulent displacement of native peoples.
On broader timescales, something similar could be said of most contemporary European landowners. No part of the globe is entirely free of all history of conquest, displacement, and colonization. Nearly every square inch of ground legally owned by a human being today was, at some time in the past, taken by duplicity and violence, often multiple times over.
Indeed, greed and displacement also informed the capitalist property norms of post-Reformation England and Europe. In seventeenth- and eighteenth- century England and Scotland, the enclosure movements pushed peasants off the land they had held in common since time immemorial, sparking populist backlash. As the industrial revolution took hold in England, disparities between the working and upper classes became even more dire. Meanwhile, the awful conditions of peasantry in other parts of Europe, along with new political movements, roiled the content.
By the midnineteenth century, in response to these developments, Karl Marx published his The Communist Manifesto. As communism took its path in the Soviet Union and later in China, Christian socialists and various other kinds of social democrats proposed and have attempted to implement third-way-type alternatives to capitalism, fascism, and communism. Their thinking influenced labor movements in Great Britain, Europe, and the United States, the American “New Deal” era, and the Civil Rights Movement.
Today, it seems views about capitalism and socialism are more polarized than ever. This polarization also seems to extend across ecclesial and theological lines. Theologians and church leaders who promote versions of Christian socialism often shortchange the important historical links between private property, private markets, and civil liberties. Those who link Christianity and capitalism often appear oblivious to how the Christian tradition and scriptures speak about property, wealth, and the good society, and to the deep history of Christian socialism.
Few theologians or church leaders in these contemporary debates explore the tight connections between law and economic systems. Many fail to situate their economic theologies within a broader ecclesiology, eschatology, and soteriology, and therefore lack a theology of law within their operative political theologies.
In this book, I write as both a theologian and an American law professor. As a theologian, I hope to be attentive to the nuances of the biblical witness and to the deep tradition of Christian reflection on wealth and poverty. As an American law professor who teaches constitutional law and property law and who has also written two books on the theology of law, I hope to draw out questions concerning how different economic theologies might lead to specific kinds of legal frameworks in ways that have thus far been underexplored. I first try to develop a biblical narrative theology of wealth and economics, then consider important events and themes from the Christian tradition before moving toward a contemporary, constructive economic theology.
The results of this exploration are not straightforward. The biblical witness, read both holistically as a narrative of God’s gracious acts of creation and redemption and critically as a complex set of historical texts, offers divergent themes. Creation is beautiful and abundant, but human beings often fail to cultivate and care for it and for each other, and as a result, we suffer the curses of sin, including toil and scarcity. God calls a people in Israel and establishes a law that protects the poor and oppressed, but the creation of this people entails the displacement and destruction of others. Israel’s patriarchs are blessed with wealth and influence, and its wisdom literature idealizes prosperity as a blessing, but the prophets condemn the wealthy for their greed and hypocrisy. In the Gospels, Jesus, an apocalyptic Messiah, sides with the poor and demands that his followers renounce wealth and possessions, while his own attitudes and his followers’ practices sometimes seem less extreme. In Acts, the first followers of Jesus after his death and resurrection share everything in common, but the community of goods quickly becomes a partial norm. The apostle Paul, in his letters, commends generosity but seems to affirm Roman patriarchal household norms, including the role of slavery. The apocalyptic literature, not least in the book of Revelation, exposes the false powers of greed as part of the empire displaced by Jesus.
The witness of the Christian tradition—of course, not merely a single tradition but a set of related arguments over time—is no less complex. The tradition embodies the scriptural dialectic between creation and new creation, renunciation and abundance, death and resurrection, and the present age and the age to come. Parts of the tradition respond admirably to the gospel’s call in challenging circumstances, whereas parts become complicit in grave evils, including forced colonization and enslavement—often at the same time.
The result, I will argue, is that there is no single, straightforward Christian theology of economics. What Christian theology can say confidently is that any comprehensive system in the world we now inhabit—any –ism—intertwines with powers to be transformed by the kingdom of God. Communism, socialism, capitalism—all grow out of and are embedded within such powers. They are all, as systems, related to what Jesus called mammon. The challenge for a Christian theology of economics, and a related theological ethics, is to imagine what might be good and possible in this moment. This challenge is not, as some suggest, a call for the community of Jesus’s followers, the church, to remove itself entirely from the institutions of temporal law and governance that structure economic life in this world; neither is it a call, as other suggest, to force the kingdom by controlling those temporal institutions. It is a call to imagination, improvisation, and discernment, always attentive to both the living and active Spirit already building the kingdom here and now while patiently anticipating the parousia, when the coming of Jesus is fully revealed and there is no more hunger or want. What is good and possible at any moment might seem limited and temporary, but the Christian hope is that even small mustard seeds one day will produce fruits of the true end of human economy, which is joyful communion.
Praise for Faithful Exchange
“David Opderbeck offers a wide-ranging, critical, thoughtful reflection on the relentless tension between private property and the common good. After a judicious review of biblical resources, he addresses more contemporary concerns for a just economy in which the poor count in positive ways for the practice of the economy. Opderbeck affirms that the singular pursuit of private gain is deficient for an economy that is grounded in covenantal faith. This book is a major contribution to our critical, faithful thinking and merits close, sustained attention. Opderbeck boldly focuses on the interface between faith and money as an urgent issue among us.”
—Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary
“Opderbeck’s Faithful Exchange is nothing short of a monumental achievement. Those who have studied and reflected on the relationship between theology and economics will find much here that is new, and those only beginning will find a superb introduction. The breadth of knowledge, its readability, and Opderbeck’s way of framing matters are truly exceptional. A close and comprehensive reading of Scripture, along with profound reflections on theology, ethics, and law, makes this one of the most important contributions in economic theology to date.”
—Stephen Long, Southern Methodist University
“David Opderbeck combines a teacher’s eye for explanation with an outsider’s appetite for theology, a lawyer’s instinct for analysis and fine distinction, and a storyteller’s gift for ordered and engaging sequence. The result is an argument lucid in exposition, generous in vision, and informative in scope. No Christian reader could fail to be enriched by its portrayal of God’s economy, nor any economist come away from this text without an inspiring notion of the practical difference real Christianity makes. And as for a Christian economist: there are such people, and those who read this book will be moved to take their place among them.”
—Samuel Wells, vicar, St Martin-in-the-Fields; Visiting Professor of Christian Ethics, King’s College London; and author of Constructing an Incarnational Theology: A Christocentric View of God’s Purpose
“Every economics—or at least every theology of economics—implies an eschatology. But, writes David Opderbeck, most economic theologies ‘fail to express a clear eschatological vision.’ This remarkable book succeeds where so many have failed. Opderbeck argues with the clarity and acumen of a top-notch law professor and controls an immense range of biblical and theological data, like a first-rate theologian. Every time I read a book by Opderbeck I am stunned by its scope and learning, its reasoning and reasonableness, but I also walk away inspired and encouraged. More: this book gives me hope in a world where demand outstrips the supply.”
—Brent A. Strawn, D. Moody Smith Distinguished Professor of Old Testament and professor of law, Duke University
“Faithful Exchange offers a constructive Christian theology of economics of astonishing breadth, skillfully weaving together a full range of texts from Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, themes and patterns from church history, and in-depth insights from law, political theory, and economics. Students who are less familiar with one or more of these areas have much to gain from the clear and accessible interdisciplinary weave. Experts in one or more of these fields will appreciate the careful and nuanced analysis that surfaces creative tensions and complexity. All will appreciate Opderbeck’s thoughtful call for discernment and prudence in the work of crafting contextually grounded proposals for moving toward ‘the economy as it’s meant to be.’”
—Amy Uelmen, lecturer in religion and professional life, and director for mission and ministry, Georgetown University Law Center
About the Author
David W. Opderbeck is Professor of Law at Seton Hall University Law School, where he also serves as Co-Director of the Institute for Privacy Protection and Director of the Program on Faith, Values, and the Rule of Law. His legal scholarship focuses on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data privacy, and intellectual property law. He also holds a PhD in systematic and philosophical theology from the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Law and Theology: Classic Questions and Contemporary Perspectives and The End of the Law? Law, Theology, and Neuroscience.
Faithful Exchange on Fortress Press
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