The Economy of Grace
By Kathryn Tanner. Augsburg Fortress (Minneapolis, 2005). 158 pp., $16.

Kathryn Tanner, a professor of divinity at the University of Chicago, dedicates 'The Economy of Grace' to her late father, an accountant who, she says, 'always suspected that I did not fully appreciate the value of a dollar, and now here is proof.'

While the reader smiles at this remark, it becomes clear as Tanner makes the case for a Christian economic vision of the whole of life that she appreciates more than the value of a dollar. She extends that value beyond what a dollar can purchase to encompass how money can be a mechanism for sharing, for community and for being more like God.

Tanner links grace and the dollar, placing them in a dynamic tension where the dollar can be challenged and criticized by grace. She defines grace as both God's favor and the manifestations of that favor in the world --- forgiving and remedying sin, offering spiritual and moral sanctification. Tanner asserts that grace is a radical alternative to global capitalism.

She initiates a conversation between economics and theology. In this conversation, the principles governing financial transactions and industrial production are in discourse with the principles of redistribution, recirculation and collective ownership that are exhibited in the Christian story of God in the world.

Out of this conversation, Tanner builds a framework for a theological economy: a universally inclusive system that is aimed at generating and distributing goods for the well-being of the beloved community, and that is organized in such a way that what benefits one benefits all. This system of theological economy also makes room for a critique of global capitalism, exposing its weak points and offering creative suggestions for a way forward.

Central to both the critique and development of alternatives is the creation story. Tanner notes that God wills the world into being without requiring work or effort from the recipients. God gives the world to humanity with grace and with the expectation that we organize our lives with one another accordingly.

Thus, she envisions human relations structured to reflect the character of God's own giving. A theological economy would be marked by unconditional giving --- in which people give to each other not as reward and without expectation of return. In this way, Tanner seeks to take the transaction out of our relationships with one another.

In a time of plummeting social spending, rising debt and deficit, corporate impunity and economic exploitation, and billions of dollars expended in war and conflict, Tanner's assertion of grace, a theology of economics, sharing and community seem like very small steps. But they begin a process. Core to her analysis is the belief that global capitalism can be changed and redirected by human decision.

This is faith and fact, and Tanner's scholarship helps us begin to bridge the space between the two.

Frida Berrigan works on arms control issues with the World Policy Institute based at New School University in New York.