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Theology and Economic Ethics: Martin Luther and Arthur Rich in Dialogue by Sean Doherty (review)

This erudite, dense, and difficult book is part of the remarkable series of monographs published by Oxford University Press on fairly arcane subjects; Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic language, Heidegger’s Eschatology, and The Story of Israel in the Book of Qohelet are examples. This one—comparing the theological methods of Martin Luther and Arthur Rich in making judgments about ethical behavior in economic life—is a revision of a doctoral thesis, as are most monographs in the series. It reads like a top-flight doctoral thesis. It is highly nuanced, detailed, careful, ponderous, and challenging to read. Its author, Sean Doherty, is a bright young scholar and curate in the Church of England who has delved deeply into the mainly British conversation about ethics and economics. Chapter one plumbs Luther’s theological method in his early work on usury (Sermon von dem Wucher [1519, 1520]). Luther’s method is a simple and direct exegesis of Jesus’ commands in the Sermon on the Mount. The absolute commands of Jesus are “three different degrees or ways of dealing fairly and righteously with temporal goods” (13). The three are: relinquish goods freely when someone attempts to take them; give freely without expecting return; and lend without charge or interest (13). Luther upholds the medieval Catholic prohibition against taking interest on loans, which was breaking down amidst the stirrings of early capitalism as well as a result of theological critiques of that prohibition. (Calvin famously dropped it.) To his credit, Luther was responding to the debt crisis experienced by peasants who lost crops and had to borrow money, sometimes at exorbitant interest rates. The second chapter is a seemingly unending examination of the magnum opus of Arthur Rich (1910–92), a fairly obscure Swiss theological ethicist, who concluded his Wirtschaftsethik in the early 1980s. It was finally published in English in 2006 as Business and Economic Ethics: The Ethics of Economic Systems. Rich was an exceedingly careful scholar who attended to every possible issue in developing his method of relating Christian ethics to economic theory