Joost Hengstmengel
Journal of Economics, Theology and Religion, vol. 6 (2026): #-#
Publication history
First view: 29 October 2026
There is no shortage of surveys of the history of economic thought. Overviews of specific periods in the historical interaction between economics and Christian theology have also become increasingly available. Until recently, however, a comprehensive account of the history of Christian economic thought was still lacking. Ballor and Matson have addressed this gap with their textbook. It examines how the Christian religion and theology have shaped economic thought and theorizing, from the Old and New Testaments as interpreted by early Christian writers to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The textbook is accompanied by a sourcebook, Sources in Christian Political Economy, which presents some fifty excerpts from this same two-thousand-year history. In terms of its intended level, the authors appear to target an audience of advanced undergraduate and early-stage graduate students, at least in the case of the sourcebook, and probably with the textbook itself as well.
The textbook is written from the conviction that Christian thought and practice have exerted a significant influence on Western economic history. They have been, in the words of the authors, “essential variables” (3). At least until the nineteenth century, and to some extent beyond it, the intellectual history of Christianity and the history of economic thought were inextricably intertwined. The book aims to map this entanglement and the “rich diversity of Christian reflections on political economy” (xiii).
The authors deliberately use the term “political economy” rather than “economics.” The latter term only gained currency towards the end of the nineteenth century and is therefore less suitable for describing earlier forms of economic theorizing. Political economy, they argue, is broader in scope, referring to “the study of the relations between human society and material wealth” (9). I am not entirely convinced, however, that this terminological choice is the most felicitous. Traditionally, political economy was understood as an extension of household management to the management of the state, and of household economics to the science of political economy. The term thus has an explicitly political dimension. Many of the pre-Smithian authors discussed by Ballor and Matson did not engage with economic questions at this level of analysis. Why, then, not simply use the more inclusive term “Christian economic thought”?
The roughly two thousand years of Christian reflection on economic matters are divided by the authors into seven periods. Chapter 1 examines the contributions of the Church Fathers (Early Church, 100–500); chapter 2, those of early medieval thinkers (Early Medieval Period, 500–1225); chapter 3, high scholastic thought (Late Medieval Period, 1225–1500); chapter 4, early modern theorizing (Early Modern Period, 1500–1725); chapter 5, the “classical” era of economics as a scientific discipline (Classical Period, 1725–1848); chapter 6, the age of industrial capitalism (Industrial Period, 1848–1918); and chapter 7, developments through the end of the twentieth century (Twentieth Century, 1918–2000). Some more recent developments are addressed in the concluding chapter. Each chapter begins by outlining the broader historical context, proceeds to highlight selected aspects of the economic history of the period in question, and then turns to economic thought proper. By providing this fuller picture of each period, the book is indeed well suited to both teaching and independent study.
Covering many dozens of thinkers—among them theologians, philosophers, and economists—across two millennia of Christian history, A History of Christian Political Economy is an expansive work. Its breadth inevitably invites questions about the selection of authors: why include one thinker rather than another? It also invites scrutiny of the authors’ interpretations of the texts and theories under discussion: do they read too much into them, or perhaps too little? The authors may well have had such considerations in mind when they chose to call their book A History rather than The History. What speaks in favor of both the textbook and its accompanying sourcebook is the considerable diversity of voices that Ballor and Matson bring into the conversation. Readers encounter Western and Eastern Church Fathers, medieval theologians and jurists, early modern thinkers from different parts of Europe, and both Roman Catholic and Protestant schools of thought in more recent times. I found the surveys of the diversity within twentieth-century Roman Catholic Social Teaching and Ecumenical Protestant Social Thought particularly illuminating. The book is also valuable for bringing together a substantial body of recent secondary literature, thereby offering insight into the current state of research. That the authors have not relied exclusively on secondary sources is evident from the many references to and quotations from primary texts.
Readers interested in a particular theme may occasionally find it difficult to trace its development through the book. Although the volume contains a helpfully extensive index of names and subjects, consulting it reveals that the chronological framework is not always strictly observed. For example, the first chapter on the early Church makes no mention of the controversy over interest (“usury”), even though this was, alongside the morality of trade, one of the major points of contention in patristic economic thought. Only in chapters 2 and 3, on the early and late medieval periods respectively, do fragments of the patristic discourse begin to emerge. These, however, are minor shortcomings in what is otherwise an admirable undertaking.
One particularly interesting—and indeed indispensable—feature of a work of such breadth is its use of a thematic lens. As Ballor and Matson explain in their introduction, two broad perspectives on “political economy” can be discerned in the history of Christian economic thought. The first is static, emphasizing the limited availability of material goods. From this zero-sum perspective, one person’s gain is another’s loss. The second is dynamic, emphasizing material abundance instead. It views economic activity as a positive-sum game in which mutual benefits are possible. A further distinction cuts across these two perspectives, separating writers on economics who place greater emphasis on the spiritual from those who focus more on the material and temporal dimensions of life. The result is a quadrant, or spectrum, comprising four types of Christian economic thought:
[see PDF file]
It is a missed opportunity that this illuminating lens is not applied more consistently in the discussion of the various periods and thinkers. The theme only returns to the foreground in the concluding chapter, where the authors present it as a tension running throughout the history of Christian economic thought and already present in Scripture itself. They locate modern economic thought in the lower-right quadrant of the framework, as focusing on “the good of men’s wallets rather than their souls” (372). There is, they argue, nothing inherently wrong with this orientation. Material abundance is something to be valued positively, provided that it does not come at the cost of evident impoverishment in cultural, moral, and spiritual terms. One might wonder, however, whether we have not long since reached that point.
Towards the end of the book, Ballor and Matson turn to a theme of particular relevance to the readership of this journal: the relationship between economics and theology. By this point, the reader will have become well aware of the centuries-long history of interaction between the two. But is it also “a match made in heaven” (375)? The authors argue that the separation of theological and economic thought that took place during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is regrettable. Theology needs economics, they contend, invoking Étienne Gilson’s observation that “piety is no substitute for technique.” Conversely, economics needs theology because “man does not live on bread—or GDP per capita—alone” (an allusion to Matthew 4:4). The first claim means that every believer ought to possess at least some knowledge of economics. God calls Christians to stewardship, and an understanding of the economic domain and its processes is therefore no superfluous luxury. Economists, for their part, would do well to become somewhat more like theologians, lest they succumb to the imperialistic tendencies of their discipline. Theology can protect economics from economism, the tendency to treat the economic perspective as all-encompassing.
“God will hopefully continue to bless us with both economically informed theologians and theology-sensitive economists” (392), Ballor and Matson conclude. This could well serve as the motto of the current journal.
