The Genesis of Economics

We live, writes Italian economist Luigino Bruni in his The Economy of Salvation, in an exhausted age in which “words are tired” and “worn out,” when “old things have passed away . . . and there is a yearning desire for something new.” In such a time of fatigue and transition, the Bible that “nurtured and inspired our civilization” can revive our language and our souls. Its “generative words” return us to our “narrative patrimony.” The Bible is especially relevant to economics because many of the fundamental concepts of that discipline have theological origins—the invisible hand, debt and debt relief, even the concept of oikonomia itself, which Scripture and the Christian tradition use to describe God’s wise management of the household of creation. An advocate of civil economy, Bruni looks to the Bible to fill out his notions of pact, reciprocity, personal relation, and gratuitousness, all essential to economic health.