Arttu Mäkipää
Journal of Economics, Theology and Religion, vol. 5, no. 1 (2025): 27-43
Abstract
The vast majority of economists reject the relevance of theology for their discipline. This paper challenges that consensus. Theological anthropology sees human beings as simultaneously created in the image of God, but also as fallen (through original sin). I argue that the combination of the two states has enduring significance, also for economic agency. Both theology and economics are suspicious about human nature, with the egotistical utility-maximizing homo economicus bearing a strong affinity with the fallen human being (of theology). Nevertheless, a “paradox of the Fall” can be identified, in which the Fall has positive effects on economic and social progress. In one account, the Fall leads to a multiplication of human needs, which produces more economic dynamism (and output). In another, the universality of sin produces the virtue of humility and equality before the law. The paradox of the Fall is an example of how theological realism about humanity can enrich the anthropological presuppositions of economics.
Keywords
Fall, original sin, genesis of economics, theological economics
Publication history
First view: 23 April 2025
Published: 20 May 2025
1. Introduction
At the time of Adam Smith (1723-90), when economics was a subdiscipline of moral philosophy, a dialogue between theology and economics would have been natural. Fast forward 250 years, the picture is vastly different: true dialogues between the two disciplines are rare. Gradually, over the past century, economics first became an autonomous discipline, only to eventually stop listening not only to theology, but to other sciences as well (Fourcade et al. 2015). The formal sophistication of economic analysis during the twentieth century brought with it the attempt to escape the shackles of normativity by trying to become a positivist science (Friedman 1966). More recently, developments such as institutional economics and behavioural economics have helped to again diversify the tools of economic analysis. Within the evolving and relatively flexible mainstream paradigm, the economics discipline has proven adaptable, at some point even reaching a certain level of dominance in the landscape of social sciences (“economic imperialism,” Lazear 2000). In parallel to the academic discipline itself, economic policymaking gradually became more sophisticated and more effective, also helping to generate more income than ever before, leading to global welfare. In short, economic progress has been undeniable, bringing with it several blessings, including reduction in poverty, improved access to health care and education, and higher living standards.
However, excesses, bubbles, and crises of different kinds have accompanied economic policymaking from its early days. In the 1960s, the former German minister of economy Kurt Schiller compared the attempt to manage the economy with the vanity of attempting control when riding a tiger—the difficulty of control paralleled in the impossibility of getting off the tiger (Schiller 1967). The oil crisis of the 1970s and the collapse of communism, as well as various financial crises in the last decades, have sent their own warning signals, indicating an inherent vulnerability of the system, in particular vis-a-vis excesses of human psychology (“animal spirits,” Akerlof and Shiller 2009). More recently, contributions highlighting unwelcome ecological and social developments have increasingly emerged (e.g., Raworth 2017). As a result, it has not always been clear whether the journey is under control, and to what extent contemporary economics sustainably serves human life.
While a host of institutional solutions are being put forward elsewhere, in this paper I suggest an additional anthropological reason for this paradoxical state of progress. What could be called “anthropological anorexia” (McNerney 2016) manifests itself in social and economic sciences as weak understanding of human nature, including the depth of the human condition. In helping to remediate this anorexia, I will draw from theological anthropology which sees human beings as simultaneously created in the image of God with enormous potential, but also as fallen (under original sin) and capable of bad motives and behavior, ranging from mistakes to outright evil. My argument starts out with the observation that economics generally ignores the doctrine of the Fall (or original sin) in its explicit formulation, only to implicitly share considerable common ground with theology on the matter, both being highly realistic about human intentions. This happens as the fallen human condition of sin in theology is “naturalized” in economics (and the philosophical currents kicked off by the Enlightenment), gradually taking God out of the equation, turning the moral vice of sin into a natural limitation. Challenging the naturalization paradigm, I offer the theological concept of the Fall and the associated anthropological condition of (original) sinfulness as possible partial explanatory factors for economic growth and progress, through two potential channels. The first is what I call “the Fall as accelerator,” arguing how the Fall may well have an accelerating and enhancing impact on economic activity and output to a degree often and easily underestimated. I bring in prominent thinkers such as St. Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Malthus, Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, and Michael Novak to support the argument of how the multiplication of human needs is strongly grounded in the Fall. The second channel touches on the (perhaps surprising) origins of the rule of law, in what I call “the Fall as provider of equality.” Institutional economics and the sub-discipline of law and economics have long underlined the crucial significance of legal certainty, equality before the law, and the rule of law, for economic progress. I show how this is intricately linked to the Fall.
The paper proceeds in four parts: the following section, Section 2, defines the hamartiological argument, asking what (original) sin is in theology and economics. The third section presents the argument on the Fall as an accelerator, while the fourth presents the argument that the Fall is the source of equality as an origin of rule of law. Following the main arguments, Section 5 briefly discusses why the theological account should at least be seriously considered. Section 6 concludes and connects the dots on the resulting “paradox of the Fall.”
2. The Fall and (original) sin in theology and economics
The Fall in Theology
The doctrine of sin may be imperative for theology, but it remains a strange animal for the other sciences, with a rather low interdisciplinary rate of acceptance. In his book on Original Sin: A Cultural History, Alan Jacobs discusses the paradox that the notion of original sin carries. He calls it a “provocation of this single strange idea – a provocation that is located in its combination of repulsiveness and explanatory power” (Jacobs 2008, loc. 209). In other words, with original sin there is a dilemma between its strong presence in human reality and experience and the strong wish that it was not there. Similarly, even though it is repeatedly “diluted or denied” by moderns, G. K. Chesterton called original sin “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved” (Chesterton 2009, 28-9).
Even in theology the concept has a range of meanings, and it is impossible to capture the essence of sin in any single concept or term. The representative metaphor most commonly used to refer to the origins of sin is that of the “Fall,” referring to the first sin(s) in history as the disobedience and the subsequent separation (“falling”) of Adam and Eve from the presence of God following creation (Genesis 1-3). In hamartiology, the theological study of sin, the doctrine of the Fall as an historical event is often separated from the doctrine of sin. One of the reasons for this is that the historicity of the Fall, and the transmission of guilt and moral responsibility from the Fall to the present day, are not straightforward commonly accepted positions (Vainio 2021). Unsurprisingly, thus, “original sin” in the sense of present-day guilt for an event in history by no means constitutes a shared Judeo-Christian moral tradition. The disagreement on the attribute “original” further relates to the nature of inheritance of the sin of Adam, whether it be a physical transmission of the sin (Augustine), a hereditary depravity (John Calvin), or Adam’s role as a “representative head of humanity” (e.g. R. C. Sproul), just to mention a few prominent positions.
Against the background of the conceptual plurality in the concept of sin, twentieth century (Protestant) theology has further sharpened a relational understanding of sin, a development accompanying the relational turn in philosophy and theology. Building on Martin Luther’s definition of sin as the human being (or heart) turned in on himself – homo/cor incurvatus in se ipso, the German theologian Eberhard Jüngel called a sinner “a person without relations, with no relation to God or to self” (Jüngel 1989, 107). This loneliness becomes a stance against God, with the sinner being a breaker of the Shalom. In the Protestant understanding, this notion of being against also means that more than merely an act or a series of acts, sin is a state of (relational) being, a state of separateness from God in which the human being’s primary interest is the self. In this relational understanding of sin, the idea of the Fall is linked to the intrinsic sociality of human beings because at the root of it theologically is the separation from God, through the privation of community. This lonely individual human being only serving him/herself is the direct consequence of the heart turned in on itself, as in Luther’s image.
In line with this, Swiss theologian Emil Brunner calls this the “man in contradiction” (with himself) – Mensch im Widerspruch (Brunner 1941). Through the Fall, this human being now lives in contradiction, or conflict, with his or her origin and true self. This basic incompatibility of the true and the real (actual) human being can be likened to a state of permanent conflict in which the self-experiences displacement, disorientation, and anxiety. This state of being has consequences not only for the individual, but also for the social life. What is more, this self-awareness of the contradiction gets more pronounced the more social and cultural progress there is. As Brunner expresses it: “If man rises to higher levels of intellectual and cultural life, so does sin. It follows him like his shadow” (Brunner 1929, 101). Brunner goes on to explain how “there is hardly any good invention which is not immediately also taken into use in the household of the devil” (Brunner 1939, 265). In other words, if held true, there is an anthropologically grounded ethical disorientation in human beings that increases with economic and social progress. This is the double-edged sword of progress. Without aspiring to establish a verified causality between the two, this argument chimes with the findings in the happiness literature, where subjective happiness and well-being have been found to “delink” from the growth in income at some point.[1]
The Fall Naturalized (in Economics)
The science of modern economics took from Christian theology its pessimism regarding the selfish inclinations within human nature, and in no little measure built its (mostly implicit) assumptions about human motivations on the basis of this pessimism. A certain basic anthropological parallel between economic man and fallen theological man has also been suggested before by others (e.g. Hollis 1981, Tatum 2017). In economics, the insatiability of human desires, once a moral vice of fallen man, gradually became a positive trait, nothing short of the a foundational principle. Within an Enlightenment-infused deist framework, blaming nature itself, rather than the human being, becomes sufficient: “It is well that nature imposes us in this manner,” Adam Smith had already written much earlier (Smith 2016 [1759], 187). Emil Brunner, in a broader argument relating to how the (methodologically) atheist worldview of naturalism deals with sin, describes the same parallel as follows: “Naturalism knows of original sin – even though it does not know what sin is – this means it sees the facts that in correct interpretation are original sin, but calls them nature.”[2] More recently, Simeon Zahl also calls this “sin, hiding in plain sight” (Zahl 2018). Economics, as well as other social sciences, works with fallen human beings without calling them that. As a result, sin may well be very much present in economic and social scientific analysis, it is just that these disciplines have lost the tools and “feelers” to identify it. Sometimes, contemporary social sciences may be successful in describing the natural human being and are under the impression that this is all there is to it. Donald Hay (2016) writes:
The fallenness of humanity may have an important implication for the ability of [dominant social science] paradigms to model social and economic behaviour adequately. … So the “natural man” of Paul’s theology may well be motivated by sexual gratification and material goods, and may pursue these goals within a rational choice model in which these inform his “preferences.” Social construction may explain how members of a society come to hold such goals, accepting them uncritically as social norms. There is considerable truth in the suggestion that social science provides an analysis of the behaviour of fallen human beings.
Convincing economists of this theological anthropological argument relying on revelational insights is a challenging task, to say the least. In its standard classical positivist formulation mentioned above, economics is agnostic about human nature and motivations. Consequently, it does not need any explicit concept of sin. The closest the discipline comes to the issue in explicit terms is to recognise limits to human knowledge as a lack of perfect information, as “bounded rationality.” The subject, the “representative agent” of economic analysis, is a forward-looking and utility-maximizing individual. This representative agent is certainly self-interested, whether that amounts to outright selfishness and egotistic behaviour can be debated (cf. Becker 1996, 21). However, whatever mistakes (or even evil) any single individual may commit, standard economic method does not recognise them as part of the factory-settings, as they are averaged out (or cancelled out) in the representative agent. There, utility—in practice measured as income and prices—is dominant. In this way, short of explicitly ignoring sin, it is elegantly internalized (=ignored) in the classic economic method.
Of course, sins as deeds, that is to say as individual acts which can be analyzed as part of observed human behavior (such as drinking and gambling), are not foreign to economic analysis (Cameron 2002). However, as Deirdre McCloskey argues, given the fundamental task of economics as management of scarcity, it should have a much broader mandate as “the very science of sin, the original sin which made for scarcity, loss of Eden, and all our woe” (McCloskey 2004).
Here, there is another potential parallel worth exploring. The sinner of theology, as a lonely person without relations, was explored in the previous section. Also, the economic man (strictly speaking) does not need any social relations to operate. He can be depicted as a “rational fool” and a “social moron” (Sen 1977) stripped to only his rationality, incapable of social relations. Unpacking this parallel goes beyond the scope of this paper, however. Nonetheless, in conclusion, the key insight here is therefore that economics and theology deal with the very same (realistic) human being.
3. The Fall as accelerator – an economy driven by the culpa
(How) can this human sinfulness be a driver of economic dynamism? Surprisingly perhaps, this paradoxical idea has biblical roots. Early Midrashic writings interpret the evil and vain inclinations of man as being the constructive forces of mankind. The Jewish yetser hara ( יֵצֶר הַרַע)—propensity to sin—is seen as constitutive of the human condition. “This teaches you that were it not for the evil inclination, man would not have built a house, would not have married, and would not have begotten children,” more so, there would have been no trade and “the world (civilization) would not have become enduring” (Cohen 1980, 497). This interpretation is based on the book of Ecclesiastes, especially its discussion on the evil under the sun in chapter 4:4, by the type of vanity where “all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbor” (ESV).
In his work on The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, Peter Harrison provides a convincing argument regarding the link between the Fall and scientific progress. Harrison shows how the Christian doctrine of the Fall picks up on the Jewish thought, but also takes it further. For Augustine, fallen “man pursues one thing after another, and nothing remains permanently with him, [as…] his needs are so multiplied that he cannot find the one thing needful.”[3] Thus, for Augustine, the vanity and multiplicity of human needs is established nowhere else but in the Fall. While Augustine lamented this state, later, when a transition from a belief in divine providence to natural law took place during the Renaissance, a sublimation of evil swiftly followed, and, as anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argued, self-love changed its “moral sign” (Sahlins 1996, 397). In this process, first, nature appropriates God’s powers, only to eventually pass them on to human valuation. Throughout the process the “needs” remain, however, and in this narrative, they become the very foundation of society. Thomas Malthus opined that (natural and moral) “evil exists not to create despair but activity,” and called it the duty of every individual actively to remove evil from oneself and one’s surroundings. The “more wisely he directs his efforts, and the more successful these efforts are, the more he will probably exalt his own mind, and the more completely does he appear to fulfil the will of the creator” (Malthus 2013 [1798], 308). Thus, for Malthus, it is through the struggle against evil that activity is created, but also that we become human. Only a few years before Malthus, this same idea was put forward by Immanuel Kant, for whom a certain conflictual mutual antagonism and “unsocial sociality” of man lie at the heart of fighting passivity, helping him reach “higher levels of achievement” (Kant 2015 [1784], loc. 267).
Harrison goes on to show how this is the starting point for positive interpretations of the Fall, a felix culpa (Harrison 2007, 255), a “fortunate flaw.” The term felix culpa originated in many Church Fathers’ writings in the context of the more theological notions of the benefits of the Fall in terms of the grace of resurrection. In a semantically adapted way it also played a role in the very ascent of modern moral philosophy and, eventually, economics. A first to mention in this context is Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, in which private vices produce public benefits. For Mandeville, at the root of the private vices is the Fall that produces both a sociable creature, but also the “multiplicity of desires” that becomes nothing less than the foundation of civilization (Harrison 2007, 254). Adam Smith did not accept Mandeville’s basic premise of moral evil: it was, rather, imposed by nature (Smith 2016 [1759], 187) as argued above, or perhaps even a plan by God (or the deity (Hill 2001). In any case, for Smith, too, the end result was self-interest naturalized into social benefit.
Following a similar logic of transformation of the notion of self-interest into something positive, more recent thinkers such as Michael Novak have gone a step further than Mandeville and Smith, by declaring free self-regulating markets (or democratic capitalism) as virtue-inducing and civilizing mechanisms. This is because free markets best appropriate the nature of sin and are successful precisely for this reason. Novak describes democratic capitalism as “a system designed for sinners, in the hope of achieving as much moral good as individuals and communities can generate under conditions of ample liberty” (Novak 1990, 95). In this context it is also noteworthy to point to Deirdre McCloskey’s defense of liberalism in a post-lapsarian world where people are faced with scarcity and choice. From this unique combination of free enterprise under conditions of scarcity “trade-tested progress” occurs (McCloskey 2016, 11). In this vein, the Fall becomes one foundation among others of liberty, civilization, and welfare. The human predicament is the source from which life can be understood as the search for satisfaction and the melioration of pains and unpleasantries. Sahlins puts it even more succinctly, stating that the “economics of Genesis are the genesis of economics” (Sahlins 1996, 397). Sahlins also discusses the above-mentioned argument of how, through the Fall, man becomes the slave of his own needs. However, this is not the end of the road as “[s]till, God was merciful. He gave us Economics”(Sahlins 1996, 397). In conclusion, it is important to stress that this section has necessarily—for the sake of argument—concentrated on parts of the overall picture, namely the positive consequence of the dynamism of the Fall. A holistic analysis of the impact of the Fall would certainly need to balance this against other undeniable negative consequences thereof, such as environmental degradation and other social ills, as already mentioned in the introduction. A detailed analysis of these is beyond the scope of this paper.
4. The Fall as a provider of equality – the rule of law
The second channel, “the Fall as provider of equality,” operates via a more institutional framework. The thesis of universal human equality lying at the root of the emergence of the rule of law is not entirely new (Hill 2020). Even though built on Judeo-Christian foundations, the political and institutional realization of this equality only came later with institutional developments brought about by thinkers such as Madison and Montesquieu. Economists have thus far only marginally grappled with this question, albeit institutional economics has long underlined the crucial significance of legal certainty and the rule of law for economic growth and progress (Barro 1998; Acemoglu et al. 2012, 305).
The main thesis here is that fundamental human equality is theologically founded in human beings created in the image of God, with intrinsic dignity, and immense creative potential that are prerequisites for social progress and for advancing human well-being in society. However, in theological anthropology, the creation is closely followed by human uncreation, in the event of the Fall. The Fall, in its standard theological understanding, is universal, shared by all humanity; it is a joint condition, whether one accepts the premise or not. The awareness of this universal human condition of “joint” fallenness provides for unprecedented epistemic and ethical humility and equality, which has even been called a “universal democracy of sinners.”[4] Thus, the virtues of humility and equality become prevalent particularly in ethical environments in which the severity of the Fall, and the universality of sin, is accepted and pronounced. The vulnerability of the human condition has a disciplining effect on human solidarity and behaviour. This line of thought is similar to Paul Ricœur’s idea of human beings being “rendered responsible by the fragile” (Ricœur 1996, 16). The realization of how bad the situation is becomes the first step in amelioration, of improving things, much along the logic of the previous section. Paul Ricœur’s thought is well suited to continuing to exemplify the logic by which this channel operates: it is the evil that helps sharpen one’s idea of the “good.” The good becomes that which makes the evil “not to be.” As the undesirable guides the desirable, “humans have a clearer vision of what is lacking in human relationships than the right way of organizing them” (Ricœur 1999, 177). Thus, an understanding of the “wrong” in society is needed to move towards the “good.” Otherwise, the predicate “good” risks being tainted with uncertainty.
A clearer understanding of the “wrong,” and a desire to act against it, involves a pronounced concept of justice. Recent contributions within the philosophical school of personalism are in agreement with moral philosophy here in pointing to the importance of rules-based justice in an environment of moral realism and evil. For Robert Spaemann, in his seminal treatment on Persons, a decisive personal act is the free act of “recognition” of responsibilities towards the other in community, which is fundamental for personhood (Spaemann 1996, 23). Recognition means respecting the place and personhood of the other. It does not entail the lack of instrumentalization, or lack of competition between persons, premises which are rather important presuppositions in contemporary economics. Rather, it means respect for the procedural rules. Spaemann discusses how the ideal of pure, non-instrumentalizing, cooperation has existed time and again. However, this ideal has always failed as it is not built on a correct understanding of personhood. Cooperation also brings people up against each other, as persons are individuals with interests, especially when they act and think in the common space. As a solution, thinking about the procedural framework is the only way out. Procedural rules, e.g. through respect for the rule of law, is the recognition of the rules undergirding the common good. These rules also serve to domesticate the conflict and produce equality.
Procedural rules alone however are not sufficient if they are not internalized by the people. In other words, in accordance with the concept of recognition of the other, adherence to rule of law needs to be strong enough to capture not only the letter of the law, but also the spirit of the law. The current system and economic man are not automatically geared up to this. Emanating from legal positivism, the obedience of economic man stops with the letter of the law; he will not care much for the spirit of the law. Within the system that economic man is part of, self-interested as he is, he will seek to exploit any loophole whenever there is an opportunity. He thus lacks any intrinsic commitment to the spirit of the law and the common good of the system, unless of course it is at the same time in his own interest. From within this paradigm, the only available policy prescription to counter this type of behavior is social mechanism design, i.e., trying to build a system with no loopholes. The academic community of economists has been active in precisely this field of mechanism design, where the system is perfected and made incentive-compatible. However, the quest for purely systemic solutions has also proven its clear limits. This is because the fundamental problem is anthropological in nature, and the motives of the person (or economic agent) are perhaps not as ethically neutral and pure as imagined.
With an exclusively positive (not fallen) view of human nature, the burden of countering unwelcome developments and evil always lies with the system, never the human being. Therefore, the pressure on the system is immense. However, rooting the system in a critically realist understanding of the human person, the person needs to be taught and normed also to respect the spirit of the law on which the common good rests. The argument here is that this type of an anthropology is more likely to come about where the traditional doctrine of the Fall is held in high regard. An intrinsic recognition and acceptance of the common good is therefore more likely in environments where rule of law—including the principle of equality before the law—is held in high regard.
Fortunately, rule of law and related good governance variables are measurable parameters. The best data has been produced by the World Bank and a selection of top 20 countries is presented shown in the below Table 1.
| Country | Rule of Law Average |
| Finland | 1.97 |
| Norway | 1.92 |
| Denmark | 1.90 |
| Sweden | 1.86 |
| New Zealand | 1.86 |
| Switzerland | 1.85 |
| Austria | 1.83 |
| Luxembourg | 1.79 |
| Netherlands | 1.77 |
| Iceland | 1.74 |
| Australia | 1.73 |
| Canada | 1.73 |
| Greenland | 1.70 |
| United Kingdom | 1.65 |
| Germany | 1.64 |
| Singapore | 1.64 |
| Ireland | 1.59 |
| USA | 1.58 |
| Liechtenstein | 1.51 |
| Hong Kong | 1.47 |
Table 1. Top 20 strongest rule of law countries, 1996-2022 (average)[5]
This table provides only a snapshot of the top 20 countries on a database that, in its full form, is larger and much more nuanced. The main (perhaps evident) takeaway of looking at the best performing countries listed is that respect for the rule of law is clearly strongest in the West. However, certain economically advanced Asian countries (Singapore, Hong Kong) are also part of the list, and perhaps form an exception to this rule. Empirically, the correlation between the rule of law parameter and traditionally majority Christian, or even Protestant, countries is equally clear from a quick look, as 14 out of 20 are traditionally Protestant countries (grey shading). It is important to emphasize that these countries are “traditionally and historically” Protestant, as secularization in these countries is advancing strongly, and whilst Protestantism (as an aggregate) is the largest single religious affiliation in the above countries, the picture is diversifying rapidly. Due to these kinds of developments over the last decades, any solid empirical verification of this issue would require comparable and reliable panel data over Protestant countries, over a sufficient time period, as well as adequately controlling for other variables. This is not readily available, but it may be a promising line of future research.[6]
The point to take away here is that these Protestant countries are those which culturally have been subjected to a stronger concept of the Fall. I call this the “Paradox of the Fall.” While a link to Max Weber and his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1905] may be pointed out, there is, however, an important distinction. The Paradox of the Fall does not require the full Weberian theological strand to operate, i.e., it is agnostic towards any complicated theological arguments on predestination or disenchantment. In contrast, the rule of law may just suffice.
5. Why should the theological account be accepted?
Having suggested perhaps surprisingly positive dimensions of the Fall, it is necessary to underscore the added value that theology may bring to economics, and why it is worth listening to. Along the lines sketched in the second section, theology provides a unified framework that helps explain the paradoxes of beauty and brokenness, the glory and the tragedy, the self-deification and nihilism, that human beings and cultures so often experience simultaneously. It is a state of human experience that cannot be abstractly theorized on but must be concretely lived. Trying to describe this state, Emil Brunner writes that “…only Christian understanding can help escape from the unfortunate oscillation between the ‘negation of all human dignity’ and the ‘boundless exaggeration of human divinity’ spawned by the Enlightenment – namely through a view that sees the greatness and misery of humanity together in a way that chimes with experience” (Brunner 1960, 68). Economics and social science in general have been rather successful in dealing with half of this anthropological account, namely the positive account. Human agency and capability, aided by rational choice, have been standard social science tools for a long while. In contrast, our understanding of capability has seldom really been counterbalanced by our understanding of vulnerability, and in general the tools to deal with the negative darker side have been rather weak. Thus, economics has become accustomed to theorizing away “real suffering,” hiding it under abstract concepts such as “preferences” or “values” (Sayer 2011; Mäkipää 2023).
The conviction underlying the argument in this paper is that by looking at failures, including moral failures and sin, a path towards a more operational social teleology may open up, one that through its enhanced compatibility with human reality helps eliminate unhelpful utopias and naiveté, and thus functions as a fertile ground for human flourishing. As argued in this paper, it is the theological account that can shed light on the impact of the “darker” side of human existence. From there, elements of this sin-induced incapacity, vulnerability, and evil can be identified in human experience. Examples include cognitive biases such as weak self-knowledge, attribution errors, and self-serving character traits as evidence of both human limitations but also moral failure (Moroney 2000; Mäkipää 2023, 161-83), or the mental consequences of a life with a divided self between the private vs. social identity (Burkitt 1991). Or how, in a consumer culture, it is relatively easy to relabel moral transgressions as “bad choices” (Zahl 2018). It is undoubtedly methodologically challenging to insert the above-described anthropological reality into an economic model. The basic premise is that economics needs to get over its aversion to normativity and rediscover how this normativity can arise in real-life neediness and ill-being.
The issue that appears relatively undeniable is the influence of the notion of sin on the religious and cultural narratives of the Western Christian mind. In his book Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western Mind, James Boyce tells the story of how the idea of innate human sinfulness has long undergirded Western thought, beyond theology. Be it in political federalism with the checks and balances inherent in the American founding fathers’ intentions, Darwin’s merciless evolutionary theories, Sigmund Freud’s biological justification of the dangerous and ugly impulses of human nature, or Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene,” Boyce interprets a number of non-Christian, even atheist, thinkers as being “unaware of the continuity between [their] own understanding of human nature and the ancient teaching of Augustine” (Boyce 2016, ch. 21). As the Enlightenment gradually replaced the religious order and also tried to get rid of “sin” at the same time, it managed to get rid of the term and large parts of its contextual framework, but not the underlying human nature as “from the mid-seventeenth century, it is not that descriptions of the human condition change markedly, but that this condition is no longer linked to a transcendent story of salvation” (Boyce 2016, ch. 13).
6. Conclusion – the paradox of the Fall?
In this paper I have argued how the economic and theological anthropology share considerable overlap. Given that positive economics operates through observing real behavior, this is perhaps not that surprising. This paper has unpacked two dimensions of the Fall in terms of their economic impact, and together they may hold significant explanatory power. Firstly, the acceleration of economic activity and dynamism, and secondly, the impact of the Fall on producing a kind of welfare-enhancing real equality. The first can be interpreted as being both positive (more output) as well as negative (disorientation and overshooting). The second is more unequivocally positive, though not easy to produce and to come by. The key question that motivated the argument was the search for a realistic and true anthropology, in the firm belief that an understanding of the human subject is the prolegomenon to any good social scientific argumentation. The fact that the answer was drawn from the relatively unpopular discipline of theology, and what is worse, from hamartiology (“science” of sin), may be adding insult to injury. Due to the inherent Ricœurian way of perceiving the good through the evil, it also bears elements of a paradox—the paradox of the Fall.
The (policy) recommendations following from the argument made here need not involve any radical change in the epistemic culture and method of inquiry of economics. Rather, the built-in human drive to create and innovate needs to be recognized as given and maintained. Too much (illusion of) control will only do harm. This drive merely needs more intelligent direction and channeling. Both the method of inquiry and economic dynamism need to be complemented with a better anthropological roadmap to counter the “anthropological anorexia,” recognizing the richness, thickness, and mystery of true personal existence, and the normative and relational framework within which flourishing is possible.
In this vein, a fruitful dialogue between economics and theology requires a bit of extra effort as it is not easy to reach the core of the “epistemic culture” of the discipline with arguments; they need to be “translated.” In the present case, if an anthropological capacity is missing in a simplified economic modeling exercise, but considered important, this capacity can be added and inserted into the model in different ways. One of the most prominent microeconomists of the twentieth century, Edmond Malinvaud, in defending the need to use abstractions in economic analysis, asked other social scientists to request from economists “what they will find relevant” (Malinvaud & Glendon 2006, 431). Gordon Menzies calls the practice of this type of adjustment “responsible eclecticism” (Menzies 2020). It is a mode of working where the economist remains open to influences from other disciplines, in this case theology, with its possibly more realist and richer anthropology. One example of an enriched model where the fallenness of human nature is explicitly accounted for is visible in Donald Hay and Gordon Menzies’ construction of a dualistic mixed motive valuation function that portrays human beings as both cooperative and competitive (Menzies and Hay 2012). Another example is what Menzies et al. have done recently by making economic man into a “reasonable person” reliably telling the truth about hidden action in financial markets (Menzies et al. 2019). In general, models that introduce a deeper level of relationality into economics can potentially help to overcome the negative effects of fallenness, as they help address the ontological loneliness of the economic man (e.g. Bhatt, Ogaki & Taguchi 2015).
Finally, even more radically along the lines of the second channel, could concepts such as humility and sacrificial (self-giving) love be modeled? These would reflect the brokenness and sinfulness of human beings as portrayed in theology. A voluntary denouncement of own capabilities, or the “innovation” (or secular madness) of seeing weakness as a strength (2 Corinthians 12:10), clearly drive established methods into a corner. At the same time, economics also has tools to deal with situations which undermine economic laws, e.g., through Giffen-goods. If prices and quantities can correlate positive, then perhaps the analogous tools can be developed to model sacrificial and other-regarding weakness as strength. In this mode, economics could also be taught to profit from the “apophatic” approach of epistemic humility, at times agreeing to negatively describe and circumscribe what one cannot positively describe and model. This kind of a “giving in” to the mystery, when unable to state clearly and causally, is often adopted in personalist thought. Through an own apophatic mode, economics could be attuned to build these insights into the models as constraints of various sorts.
The objective is to bring back the human person and the relational and responsible (economic) agent into economics. The need is there, as underlined by the honest words of Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps: “We economists are just beginning to understand the subject” (Phelps 2009, 30). In the end, if the underlying problem is anthropological (as is indeed the main thesis here), any research or policy initiative of these kinds will need to be flanked by adjustment in the education of economists and social scientists in general. Otherwise, the academic at work is unlikely to understand the added value of complicating one’s model in these ways. In line with Robert C. Tatum and Paul Oslington, the intention is not to replace current economics with an independent discipline of theological economics, but to provide anthropological correctives from theology as revealed knowledge, to make economic inquiry even richer, more realistic, and more human (Tatum 2017, 137-8; Oslington 2000, 34). I hope that this paper contributes to encouraging such an engagement.
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Notes
[1] In terms of per capita income, the point of delinking comes at approximately 25.000–35.000 USD. The figures are adjusted and corrected for inflation with a factor of 1.75. (Layard 2006; Helliwell 2003). Originally formulated by Richard Easterlin in 1974, and known as Easterlin paradox, latest findings suggest more nuanced results over panel data (Easterlin and O’Connor 2022).
[2] “Der Naturalismus weiß etwas von der Erbsünde – obschon er nicht weiß, was wirklich Sünde ist – d.h. er sieht die Tatsachen, die richtig gesehen Erbsünde heißen, und nennt sie Natur” (Brunner 1939, 182).
[3] Augustine, De vera religione XXI.41 (PL 34, 139), as cited in Harrison (2007, 254).
[4] A term coined by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, see Jacobs (2008, 105). A complementary grounding of equality comes from the notion that all are offered salvation on equal terms, to human beings are equal in redemption too.
[5] Source: World Bank Rule of Law Estimates 1996-2022, own calculations of the average, capturing perceptions over the strength of the indicator on a scale of -2.5-2.5. In the definition of the variable, it states that “Rule of Law captures perceptions of the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide by the rules of society, and in particular the quality of contract enforcement, property rights, the police, and the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence. Estimate gives the country’s score on the aggregate indicator, in units of a standard normal distribution, i.e. ranging from approximately -2.5 to 2.5.”World Bank, Governance Indicators, <databank.worldbank.org/source/worldwide-governance-indicators#>, accessed 14 October 2024.
[6] Currently, some basic data exists on share of Protestants, see World Population Review, <worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/protestant-countries>, accessed 14 October 2024. The data is based on data collected by the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign.
