To browse Academia. Summary Christian virtue and the free market. How is being poor the best way to prosperity? The ambiguity stems from understanding the freedom of the market exclusively in terms of freedom from unnecessary regulations or restrictions imposed by the government, rather than the freedom of the person involved in economic transactions.
This latter meaning of freedom is incomparably more fundamental than the first one that is usually affirmed. My main contention is the following: Christian virtues β and especially those affirmed by St.
These features of liberty are not so much perceived as abstract forms by the reflective mind but are rather existentially lived through the embodied praxis of a Christian community. If the market is a kind of imposed metaphysics, how must the Christian, who is called to nothing less than theosis, show resistance to the market forces by, instead, growing in Christian virtues? Looking at the concrete example of a Benedictine monastery and at how economic activities are fostered, by the monks, by their humble recognition of the gifts that one has received from the plenitude of God, I conclude: Prosperity and poverty do not exclude each other.
But there is only prosperity, where there is the grateful heart of the poor. Prosperity is something that only the poor can account for, such that only the poor can be rich. This chapter explores the vast tradition of Christian economic thought on the subject of wealth and poverty. This tradition includes the scripture of the Old and New Testaments, the writings of the early Church Fathers and the medieval Scholastics, the modern Papal encyclicals, and the opinions of contemporary Christian theologians and economists.
The predominant Christian position on the subject is largely derivative of the stewardship view of wealth, and its implications with respect to property, poverty, and charity. An influential strain in recent Christian thought Schneider a has stressed that material prosperity is a quality for human life sought by God for all people. Clearly, this objective has not been achieved. One of the reasons why the all-enveloping prosperity objective has not been reached is that its pursuit has been undertaken by down-playing God's equally-important objective of mitigating material poverty.
