Of Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption

Of Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption

Product Description

Of Divine Economy expands upon the economic connotations of the theological doctrine of redemption. The term redemption refers to a process of 'buying back' slaves from conditions of oppression, and thus compares the crux of Christian dogma to an economic exchange involving human emancipation. The phrase 'miraculous exchanges' refers to the problem of redemptive divine and human agency in an economic context in which many who desire justice and equity feel powerless and hopeless. The originality of Divine Economy lies not only in its theological reading of redemption as an economic metaphor, but also in its focus on the economic subtexts of Christian tradition and how they form and are formed by society's economic constructions. Grau's unique project merges together economic, historical, and psycho-social analysis with theological critique and construction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1613231 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 255 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author
Marion Grau is the Assistant Professor of Theology at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, a member of the Graduate Theological Union. She is the co-editor with Rosemary Radford Ruether of Interpreting Post-Modernity: Responses to Radical Orthodoxy. Her essays have appeared in Strike Terror No More: Theology, Ethics, and the New War, Postcolonialism and Theology, and Crosscurrents.

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provocative Feminist economic reading of Christian redemption
Of Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption by Marion Grau (T. & T. Clark Publishers, Ltd.) (Hardcover) is an interdisciplinary theological text that engages a variety of postmodern discourses in a dialogue across time and place. In rereading ancient Christian texts along with poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonial works, I employ these critical theories not as a trendy plot to discredit tradition but as a valuable tool for the critical investigation of material that rarely has been critically engaged. As we will see, rereading Christian texts in this manner reveals the potential of imagining a trickster-like "God the economist": a gambler and a courageous, hopeful investor in unpredictabilities, involved in subversive divine economic deals. Thus, divine economy emerges as less predictable, as it renegotiates "the domi¬nant oikonomia-the economics, the ecology, the ecumenism of order." It deconstructs simplistic characterizations of God as "capitalist" or "commu¬nist" and instead delights in uncovering multiplicities of economic rela¬tionality that resist tyranny, stasis, and oppression by envisioning strategies of flexible, miraculous exchanges. Aware that "theology has not outgrown the subjection of the oikos to the dominus," it points toward the redemp¬tion and release of those women and slaves expropriated by the domination of the profit-driven deified economies of late, or extreme, capitalism.
Chapter 1 positions the "third space" Grau attempts to construct by charting a variety of discursive spaces where theology and economy have intersected since the 1960s. By gaining a greater understanding of how people are invested in the economic structures they find objectionable, we must begin to understand that the line between economic justice and exploitation is not comfortably located outside ourselves but goes right through our own investments, theological, relational, and financial. The chapter further traces the outlines of a countereconomic theology that is less involved in a critique of contemporary economics than in a genealogy of the interactions between theological and material economies, ancient and postmodern.
At the core of the proposed reconstructive figuration in a contemporary feminist and postcolonial third space, chapters 2 through 4 each portray a figure that forms part of ancient and contemporary rhetorical and actual economies. Each of these figures represents an iteration of an ancient image of redemptive divine economy. They are feminist figures in the sense that, as Haraway suggests, "feminist figures of humanity . . . cannot be man or woman; they cannot be the human as historical narrative has staged that generic universal. Feminist figures cannot, finally, have a name; they cannot be native. Feminist humanity must, somehow, both resist representation, resist literal figuration, and still erupt in powerful new tropes, new figures of speech, new turns of historical possibility."
Attempting thus to "resist representation" while exploring "new tropes, new figures" from among our histories, these central chapters, which are structured as a discursive triptych, explore three textually embodied figures that not only blur the boundaries between man and woman, master and slave, but also question the binary opposition of lack and abundance, cap¬italism and Marxism, divine and earthly economies. Resisting the ten¬dency of "feminist theology ... to leave biblical interpretation to feminist exegetical and historical scholars," the approach to an interdisciplinary constructive theology in these chapters consciously engages the texts of the tradition as well as the texts of biblical and historical scholars. Thus, the three figural genealogies are situated in contemporary theological and his¬torical discussions as the descendants of Christian typologies of salvation history. These soteriological genealogies can help us to inhabit a third space beyond theological and economic dichotomies only if we hold these figures lightly. They do not mean to represent persons but rather function as tex¬tual incarnations, as hermeneutical products of textual economies that have shaped our theological past and present.
These three genealogies trace the literary lives of members in an ancient household: kurios (master), kuria (mistress), and doulos (slave), and their descendants who resemble us uncannily (unheimlich). Uncannily, in a sense that points to the ambiguity of our being at home with (heimisch) as well as unheimlich-estranged and spooked by the spectre of the hierar¬chies of gender and class written into the divine economy. The power-knowledge constructions of the human household have contributed to images of divine oikonomia that reaffirmed the patriarchal shape of the oikos at the same time as they called into question the conventions of class and gender among humans. The first figure resembles the rich young man (Matt 19:16-30) in his wealth and corresponding lack of spiritual abun¬dance; the second figure emerges from images of female givers such as the poor widow (Mk 12:43-44), whose lack of material wealth nevertheless counts as abundance with God; the third figure is the slave-liberator found in the christological topos of divine commerce, a sacred trickster mediating between dίvίne abundance and human destitution.
All of these figures share some of the characteristics of the trickster fig¬ures Haraway evokes and are formed by modes of textual production akin to what Bhabha has described as hybridity, the "problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other `denied' knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority-its rules of recognftion." Thus, these figures are not untroubled and contain great hermeneutical and incarnational complexity. Chapter 5 further elucidates the trickster qualities that emerge in the central chapters, and rethinks the way they trouble the categories of gender and class. Then it begins to portray con-temporary trickster figures as they embody miraculous exchanges.
Ambivalence remains a constant companion, an inspiration and challenge for this exploration. The figural reading proposed in these pages aims to deconstruct the proliferation of polarities as expressed in stereotypes of economic and theological genders, classes, and races and in the locations of various other forms of colonial and postcolonial embodiment. With Gayatri Spivak, they refuse to "continue to celebrate" essentializing moralisms such as those of colonizer/colonized and white/black in which "the migrant is all good" and "the whites are all bad." Instead, they embody a theologi¬cal response that gives witness to the complexities and complicities of the relations between oppressor and oppressed. They also resist the salvific proclamation of a "mighty mongrel" whose hybrid, mestizo characteristics are elevated as a new suρerbreed of human that can solve the problems of the past by embodying a variety of pasts and traditions. Such romantic displacements spawn new dangers if hybridity develops into another form of orthodoxy, reinscribing rather than challenging the divisions of the past.
The first twο figures show symptoms of hysteria, a notoriously puzzling condition in which the hysteric's body discloses through linguistic and phys¬ical symptoms a larger condition transferred onto the sufferer by his or her societal context. Chapters 1 and 3 thus offer a hermeneutic with which to read this trickster among diseases, this "mimetic disorder," as it performs "culturally permissible expressions of distress" in men and discloses unforeseen subversive potencies in women. Hysteria emerges as a disorder that closely maps the gendered economic conditions of lack and plenitude as they are assigned and reassigned in the Christian oikonomia of redemption. Although ancient rhetorical economies have endowed male bodies with an abundance of administrative and reproductive power while linking the reproductive cavities of female bodies with the appearance of both physical and mental lack, men too can be marked by hysteria, deficiency, or lack.
In chapter 2, we see how almsgiving and asceticism are theologically negotiated as male investments in an economy of salvation that informs the interpretation of the exemplary narrative of the rich young man in Matthew 19. Ascesis and almsgiving emerge as twο modes of divine and earthly resource management for the wealthy males who interpreted Matthew's text. In Matthew 19, wealth becomes poverty, while ascesis and almsgiving, although they represent renunciation, eventually pay off as a smart investment in the heavenly economy. Thus, like the seemingly unisex but rather effectively masculine homo economicus of the British enlightenment, these readers operate and make economic decisions on the basis of a notion related to hysteria and lack while continually striving for abundance.
Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray have shown that in the gendered economies of phallocentric cultures, women are traded as inferior, marked as a hollow "lack," but also signify the place where future abundance and the growth of male descendants (and hence, wealth) occurs. Women's ambivalent position between lack and abundance is similarly reflected in the rhetorical and material economies of gender and salvation in biblical and patristic texts. Chapter 3 traces the figure of the "giving woman" through several such texts. In them, we find the continued reinscription of women as the economically impoverished gender via the stereotypical ascription of lack to the bodies of women. In the overall economy of most early Christian texts, women are rarely "of substance." And even if women appear as significant figures, their images are disciplined and managed through various rhetorical topoi and societal constructs. At the same time, we find figures such as the poor widow presented as the epitome of a wealth of grace in Jesus' basíleia ("reign" or "kingdom"). At times women emerge endowed with unexpected subversive powers within the constraints of the economies of gender and church structures.
The figure of the "slave" and the "trickster" involves another set of rhetorical economies that have disciplined human and divine economies: the redemptive exchange of a price to redeem-to buy back-the body of a slave. Chapter 4 then reconstructs divine commerce using the soteriological motif of ransom from slavery. Ransom thus becomes the admirabile com¬mercium, the divine commerce and miraculous exchange between God, humanity, and the devil. A critical reconstruction of this motif brings the soteriological motif of the commercium into the twenty-first century, mim¬icking the dynamics of ancient slave management even as it changes and modifies them. The ambivalence of the "wonderful exchange" allows for a reconstruction of the topos as the redemptive trickery of a God who, while preserving wisdom and justice, is not above "deceiving the devil" for the redemption of creation. The image of divine commerce thus offers a sacred trickster's scheme as one incarnation of divine countereconomy.
The figures represent textual incarnations of early Christian notions of redemption and salvation as their salvific and material economies(almsgiving, asceticism, gender and class dynamics) become the site where constructions of human and divine economy stand in a close but tenuous relationship to each other. From these genealogies, chapter 5 develops cre¬ative possibilities for contemporary theological and economic subjects, for inhabiting various locations in a subversive, prophetic divine economy that imagines exchanges of coredemption, of "consensual salvation" in an ongo¬ing process of mutually transformed relations.
All three trickster figures live in the borderlands of heaven and earth, wealth and poverty, sincerity and deception. They embody forms of theo¬logical, sexual, and social hybridity. As genealogies of our contemporary theological and economic context, they help us to inhabit that elusive third space between theological and economic dichotomies. In chapter 5, Grau imag¬ines what the contemporary incarnations of these sacred tricksters might look like. Holy Fool, Saint Mysteria, and the Counterfeit(ing) Christ are introduced as possible descendants of the figures whose genealogies are represented in chapters 2 through 4. These trickster figures, their similarities and differences, unfold as midrash-like pieces, bridging the stretches of the millennia of salvation history. As revelatory figures, tricksters unveil the monetary, relational, and physical exchanges that become theological expressions of divine economy. Chapter 5 offers a discussion of the possi¬bilities of a tricksterish economics in a world where con men appear to win the day. The sacred trickster's redemptive trickery, in contrast, is inspired by Christ's divine commerce and the tricksterlike "economist" of Luke 16, an ambivalent figure that yet inspires divinely clever trades. A post-Weberian reassessment of ascetic practices suggests that birth control and simplified living on an overpopulated planet is a form of cultural protest, and another possible strategy. A reconstruction of the time-honored motif of the Holy Fool is followed by a call to recognize gender differences among male and female trickster figures and tactics and further to assess the gendered diver¬sity of tricksterisms. Gendering the trickster is crucial if the concept is to be inclusive of women's particular strategies. Beyond the recognition of gender difference, it will be necessary to more deeply que(e)ry divine commerce. The voluntarily enslaved male Christ of tradition is recast (with a little help from Jean-François Lyotard) as Jesus, the calculating female pros¬titute who barters salvation in return for his/her body. Such tricky trades
do not promise purity of motive or predictable profit. Rather, they always take place in a matrix of ambivalent relations and resemble the complexity of the created universe, or divine economy, which periodically returns to the creative and unpredictable edge of chaos.
In traditional constructions of redemption, not all models juxtapose the singular activity of God with the complete passivity of humanity. Rather, numerous apostolic and patristic texts central to the Christian tradition's notion of divine salvific activity retain the coredemptive character of divine salvific agency resident in many biblical texts. Eastern theologies likewise have preserved the notion of theosis as the human participation in salvation, and a sizable number of feminist theologians emphasize the synergic character of salvific relations between God and humanity. Imagining redemption as a similarly cooperative process involves a soteriology of "modest witnesses" striving to heal and be healed, yet knowing they exist in the fragile space of Paul's old predicament-the turmoil within the redeemed, the ambivalence at the intersection of the "already" and the "not yet:' This modest soteriology resonates with "ροly¬glossic" relations and does not easily figure as purely divine or merely human.
In the process of reconstructing redemption, we are working in danger¬ous and murky zones, as Moltmann reminds us: "For where this way of perceiving history is concerned, Hölderlin's saying is true: `Where there is danger, the salutary also grows'-as is also its reverse: where the salutary grows, there danger also grows (E. Bloch)" Combining Hölderlin's more optimistic statement with Bloch's more sober observation, Moltmann reaf¬firms that the kairos of a moment in space remains open for many possibil¬ities and includes potential for both dangerous and redemptive moments. In this respect, at least, the theology to be reconstructed here might repre¬sent an instance of theologia viatorum (theology on the way) suggested by Moltmann, a practice that lοοks at Scripture not as a "closed organism" but as a text open toward future instances of divine economy unfurling in each moment of space-time.

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