Tetzel on Craigslist: Commodification and the Demise of the Commons

In his incisive and thought-provoking new book, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, renowned political philosopher Michael Sandel invites us to step back and take stock of the results of the rapid expansion of market logic into every area of life that the last generation has witnessed.  Economics has transformed itself from a discipline concerned with the production, exchange, and allocation of material goods and services to a master-science claiming to describe the logic of all human social relations in terms of cost-benefit analyses.  In tandem with this theoretical shift has come the increasing subjection of areas of life once governed by non-market norms to the logic of free exchange driven by supply and demand.  Many today, including (perhaps especially?) many Christians may have difficulty in seeing what is wrong with this trajectory—after all, doesn't this represent the triumph of free, voluntary social relations over against coercive, top-down ones (for a critique of this gross oversimplification, see here)? 

 Inasmuch as the logic of the market, though, is amoral and nonjudgmental—it doesn't matter what you want and why as long as you're willing to pay for it—Christians should be deeply concerned, and should heed Sandel's call to bring morality back into the picture, asking about the moral consequences of subjecting more and more of our lives to the logic of exchange (especially as Sandel himself does not provide a theological basis for this moral concern).  Accordingly, I want to reflect here on the first set of phenomena he examines, "Jumping the Queue," from a more explicitly theological standpoint.

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Why We Really Need a New Biography of Richard Hooker

The only modern biography of Hooker, Philip Secor's Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism, offers a complex, detailed narrative of Hooker's life, replete with intimate anecdotes illuminating his personality, etc.  The only problem is that half of it is fabricated out of whole cloth, spun out of the whimsical fantasies of Secor's overactive imagination.  If this criticism merely applied to the trivial anecdotes and episodes, it might be one thing, but unfortunately, Secor's whole understanding of the theology and thought-world of Hooker and his period derives from a similarly slipshod pastiche of fact and fiction.  I offer here for your un-edification his fanciful synopsis of the distinctive characteristics of "Puritans" and "Anglicans" in the Elizabethan period on page 51: 

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Libertine Legalists

(This is an excerpt from a thesis chapter I am drafting, "Richard Hooker and the Freedom of the Christian Commonwealth"--it explores the paradoxically libertine yet legalist implications of the Puritan rejection of human authority)

For Hooker, the problem with Puritanism is a warped doctrine of Christian liberty which will assuredly destroy the liberty of the Church (and along with it, the State and the individual).  As we have seen already, the doctrine of Christian liberty declared that Scripture alone had authority over the conscience, and that therefore, no other authority outside Scripture could bind the believer.  Given the original thrust of this doctrine as a weapon against papal authority, it is no wonder that it should tend to abridge the liberty of the Church, pitting against it the freedom of the individual and the authority of Scripture.  Rightly qualified, of course, this exclusive authority of Scripture applied only in matters of faith and salvation, in “the spiritual kingdom” into which, by definition, no man could reach, and the doctrine did not need to pose any threat to suitably humble human institutions.  But as the Puritans had made Church discipline and ceremonies to be matters of faith and salvation, a clash was inevitable.  

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Some Tasty Morsels of Blogdom

Is it just me, or has the blogosphere churned out some unusually fine fare over the past week or so?  Well, the narrow corner of it I sample certainly has.  Here's some highlights you should check out:

Peter Leithart bucks the Moscow trend by offering a qualified endorsement at First Things of the recent growth of evangelical interest in social justice.  In particular, he turns to the Torah to confirm the importance of this concern, but also to critique facile equations of Christian justice with welfare statism.  If we want to care for the poor the way God wants, we should pay careful attention to the view of property and poverty enshrined in these laws, and the way they worked in practice, rather than simply appealing to vague "Jubilee principles."  Any regular reader of this blog knows that this has been a prominent theme in my own thinking and writing for the past couple years, and that Leithart is my patron saint--so naturally, I was pretty jazzed about this essay.

Stewart Clem at Transpositions offers the finest reflection I have yet encountered on Tree of Life, a film of breathtaking beauty and theological depth which has occupied my thoughts daily since I saw it two weeks ago.  The gist of Clem's reading--the film is not, in fact, about the dichotomy of nature and grace, as it seems to claim; rather, it teaches us that nature is graced, and it is only our fallen distortions of it that make us unable to recognize it.

Davey Henreckson, after a long period of comparative blogging dormancy, has erupted in the last week with a pair of fine posts on Annabel Brett's new book Changing States.  The most recent of these, on the relationship of natural virtue and God's law in early Protestant political theology, is right up my alley, even majoring on that oft-neglected but ever-fascinating Florentine, Peter Martyr Vermigli.

Finally, Jeremy Kidwell, having just migrated to a new blog home, www.domesticatedtheology.com, offers some provocative reflections on Protestantism, vocations, and intentional communities.  This post almost exactly echoed some thoughts that I recently shared with a friend, and that I've been continuing to reflect on; I never discussed them with Jeremy, but we did have a meal together that day...must've been some mental osmosis going on.

Luther on Women in the Ministry

In his fine book The Church in the Theology of the Reformers, P.D.L. Avis includes an interesting discussion of Luther's view on women's ordination. For Luther, this is based on the cornerstone Protestant doctrine of the universal priesthood, or the "priesthood of all believers."  Says Avis,

"There is no need to point out that women share equally with men in the universal priesthood; they too partake of the royal priesthood that Christ imparts to his people.  Luther supports this from the common practice of women administering baptism: 'When women baptise, they exercise the function of priesthood legitimately and do it not as a private act but as a part of the public ministry of the Church which belongs only to the universal priesthood.'  'A woman can baptise and administer the word of life by which sin is taken away, eternal death abolished, the prince of this world cast out, heaven bestowed; in short, by which the divine majesty pours itself forth through all the soul.'  When Luther grants women the power to administer baptism, he recognises that this carries with it all other priestly functions for, according to Luther, the sacrament of baptism includes the ministry of the word and is, moreover, superior to other priestly offices....There is then no suggestion in Luther's thought that women are somehow incapable of bearing the priestly 'character.'"

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