| This dissertation investigates the homological relationship between theology and economy in order to reconstruct a doctrine of Divine Economy. Beginning with a critical review of recent theological engagements with economic structures and economic discursivity, it proceeds to sketch out a 'counter-economic' theology. Bringing various post-Hegelian theories into dialogue with ancient Christian texts, it maps the space of a Divine Economy that embraces multiple economies. Avoiding a straightforward critique of contemporary economics, it represents genealogies of the interactions of theological and material economies ancient and postmodern. The dissertation's core consists of three genealogies of figures that resemble members of an ancient household. The figures of the kurios, the kuria and the slave can be traced throughout the texts of ancient Christianity as constructed by and constructing the economic gender and social status of redemption. Thus Rich Young Man and the Poor Widow as figures expose how ancient Christian traditions both resemble and challenge the cultural stereotypes of feminine deficiency and masculine plenitude that underlie neo-classical economics and traditional theologies. Rather than attempting to retrieve a 'biblical' economics, the project reveals early Christian tradition as ambivalent in the matter of economic relations and produces a counter-economic reading that seeks to deconstruct claims that certain economic systems can be lifted from the pages of the tradition. Rather, a counter-economic theology portrays a trickster-like economics, reconstructing the Rich Young Man as 'Holy Fool,' and the Poor Widow as 'Saint Mysteria.' A reconstruction of an ancient soteriological motif---the admirabile commercium---reads Christ as divine slave, as divine-human currency minted and invested in order to---through a counterfeit business transaction---effect the liberation of humanity from diabolic enslavement. This 'Divine Deal' unveils Christ as a trickster who, together with the trickster-like oikonomos in Luke 16, inspires divinely clever liberative trades. Located in a matrix of ambivalent relations, these tricky trades do not promise a predictable profit or purity, but rather resemble the complexity of the created universe---or Divine Economy---which periodically returns to the creative, yet unpredictable edge of chaos. |
