Laurence Moore’s Selling God is an extended historical meditation on religious experience in the United States, where, from the start, the two spheres of reasoning “religious and commercial” have occupied almost identical territory. They do, however, show that biblical writers regarded economic and spiritual analysis as overlapping, and yet distinct, modes of reasoning. These biblical words do not directly answer modern questions about how to organize economies, nor do they provide the believer with easy guidelines to the practical conundrums thrown up for faith and morals by the need to live in a modern economic world. In holy writ, the conjunctions between authentic faith and the worlds of commerce are strangely varied: the Hebrew Scriptures contain much in the Pentateuch on the protection and use of property, but a different realm of existence is central to the prophets: “Ho, every one who thirsts, come to the waters, and he who has no money, come, buy, and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” (Isaiah 55:1) In the words of Jesus, nothing could be stated more definitely than that “a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” (Luke 12:15) Yet from the selfsame authority we hear that the End of the Age can be compared to a man who chastises a servant for not putting “my money with the bankers” so that he could have “received what was my own with interest.” (Matthew 25:27)
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