About the author: Morgan Bell is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto (Emmanuel College). His research explores the doctrine of the First Person of the Trinity in the theology of Karl Barth. He is a minister in The United Church of Canada, an adjunct faculty member at the Vancouver School of Theology, and the Resident Visiting Scholar in Theology at the Atlantic School of Theology from January–May 2024.
To be faithful to its mandate, the Church of Jesus Christ must engage and be responsible to the world out of which and for which God raises it as a community of witnesses. Christian thinkers have long summoned the Church to greater responsivity and to more meaningful action in the world. “The Church cannot exist in an enclave!” Those who sound such calls are correct to do so, of course. The Church indeed must engage the world responsibly. But as any theologian worth their salt is quick to note, what one means by ‘world’ (let alone ‘Church,’ ‘engagement,’ or ‘responsibility’!) is far from uncontested. It is well and good to assert that God is acting in provident power in the ‘here and now.’ It is well and good to assert that the Church must correspond to God’s activity. But where is the ‘here’? When is the ‘now’? What is ‘the world’ which God loves so as to send a Son into it and raise a Church from it?
Ours is a world structured by capital. Think it good, think it bad: capital is the architecture of the world in which we live. All of us experience this world as one governed by relationships of profit, debt, and the virtually providential hand of the market. Capitalism is more than simply the economic order ‘we’ have ‘chosen’ to mediate our economic relationships: the economic arrangements of capitalism simply are concomitant to our sense of reality. Capital has seeped into the depths of our psyches such that—to paraphrase the Apostle perhaps too cutely—we have come to believe that to live is capital, and to die is another’s gain.
The late English political thinker Mark Fisher named this phenomenon ‘capitalist realism’: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”1 ‘The world’ and ‘capitalism’ have become synonymous; the end of the one signals the end of the other. The present political-economic order is so rampant, so self-protective, so consumptive that it disarms, mitigates, and absorbs the threats of all its potential rivals. Fisher (extending Slavoj Žižek) wryly notes that even ‘counter-cultural’ or ‘anti-capitalist’ movements and products—everything from alt music to (purportedly) ecologically sustainable services—all become, at the end of the day, capitalist commodities. They are marketed and sold alongside Ford half-tons and family vacations to Disneyland. We consume and endorse them as substitutes for genuinely subverting or dismantling a capitalist world. For “so long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad,” Fisher writes, “we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.”2
Fisher understood this ‘capitalist realism’ to be grounded in what he termed a “business ontology”: a basic conception of reality in which “it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business.”3 In this Weltanschauung, profit and market growth are the propulsive forces which uphold and govern our reality.
Put plainly: capitalism simply is the way the world works. Put Barthianly: the world is the external basis of capitalism and capitalism is the internal basis of the world.
Anyone who has spent much time in a congregation across the North Atlantic has heard it expressed that the Church ought to act in a more ‘businesslike’ manner—so powerful is the business ontology that it structures even our basic sense of ‘lived ecclesiology.’ But to adopt such an ontology as formative for the Church’s self-identity and the world’s fundamental character abstracts the clay from its Potter, the creation from its Creator. This is precisely why Barth insists that:
the world does not know itself. It does not know God, nor man, nor relationship and covenant between God and man. Hence it does not know its own origin, state, nor goal… It is blind to its own reality… The community of Jesus Christ exists for and is sent into the world in the first basic sense that it is given to it, in its knowledge of God and man and the covenant set up between them, to know the world as it is.4
The Church’s primary task here is to name the world aright. The world’s identity and inner basis can never be revealed through speculative observation of ‘the way the world works.’ Barth warns that in doing so, the Church risks “establishing itself on the basis of any sort of Weltanschaaung.”5 We risk predicating our doctrine of creation and all the theological loci which arrange Christian existence upon a Procrustean, discursive formation bent on human mastery and control. Rather, God’s providential activity in the world can only be known on the basis of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The world’s identity “is concealed in world-occurrence as such, and therefore cannot be perceived or read off from this. Its revelation is not world-occurrence itself, but the Word of God, Jesus Christ.”6 Christ, not capital, is the ground of the world’s existence.
And since the world is first and last the creation of God through and for Jesus Christ, the world’s internal basis is not capitalism, but more precisely covenant. To recognize that Jesus Christ is the “heart of creation” (as Rowan Williams has it) is to say that covenant—gratuitous relationship structured by God’s sovereign grace, creatures brought into gracious communion with each other and their Creator—is the molten core and chief end of the creation.7 Capital does not set the terms for creaturely relations nor could it ever pretend to a necessity to which even God is bound. Rather, God creates the world to be a theater for grace: the arena in which God’s creatures dwell in covenant with the LORD as their God and as God’s people; participants in an economy of grace.8
It is this world that the Church is raised up to serve. It is the covenantal God at the world’s center to whom the Church is raised to witness in the Spirit’s power. All that precedes, determines, and structures reality is God’s decision to be God for us in Jesus Christ and for us to be God’s people. Beneficence and gracious exchange, rather than avarice and debt, mark true creaturely relationality as we witness to the God of every good and perfect gift. To be faithful to its mandate, the Church of Jesus Christ must engage and be responsible to the world out of and for which God raises it as a community of witnesses. But to be a community of witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ’s fidelity and responsibility are contingent on speaking truth: that covenant alone is the graced esse of the world Christ Jesus has come to save. It is in such truth-telling that the Church rejects a business ontology as illegitimate and, in Jesus Christ, sets itself to the Father’s business (Lk 2:49).
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), 2.
Fisher, 12.
Fisher, 16.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Bloomsbury: T&T Clark, 2009), IV/3.2, 769.
Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G.T. Thomson (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 59.
Barth, CD III/3, 19.
Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 63.
For more on a theological economics similar to this vision, see: Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005).