The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

450 chapter 42I am not making the Jesus-as-salesman argument, the pocket-sized Godcomforting to Babbitt, with which the priest consecrates the heart-burningsof the bourgeois. Nor am I arguing as does Bruce Wilkinson in his astonishinglypopular The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life(2000). He claims that First Chronicles 4:10—“Oh, that you would bless meindeed, and enlarge my territory”—reveals that “your Father longs to giveyou so much more than you have ever thought to ask.” 17 More yachts andBMWs, he means.I am noting merely that Jesus the carpenter lived in a thoroughly market-orientedeconomy and did not ask all the fishermen to drop their netsand become fishers of people. He accepted that honest money changerswere necessary to change denarii into ritually acceptable shekels. He offeredsalvation in the marketplace, not only at the high altar of the temple. Hedined with tax gatherers, not only with the Pharisees and the hypocrites ofsad countenance.God is nothing less than perfect Love. Nor is he to be absorbed into anearthbound and utilitarian prudence. But love, I have noted, includes aproper self-love. There is nothing wrong with that. As Bernard Williamsobserved, in God’s deal there is no scarcity, and therefore no competition,and therefore “no effective way of aiming at salvation at the expense ofothers.” 18 That Christianity need not itself be inconsistent with capitalismshines in the lives of the saints who lived by trade, such as the tinker JohnBunyan, or in William Penn’s commercial yet godly plans for his woods inthe New World, or indeed in the commercial carpentry of our Lord and Savior.Christianity was in its first centuries an urban religion, appealing tohigh and low in a market economy. It offered a deal that pointed to a nonmarketrealm, but used metaphors from here below.Jesus is not entirely congenial either to a socialist or to a capitalist. Norfor that matter to many a Christian.