Study of nature of deities & religious beliefs

Denys Munby on Economics and Christianity

It has been maintained by E. R. Norman that:…the social attitudes of the Church have derived from the surrounding intellectual and political culture, and not, as Christians themselves always seem to assume, from theological learning. The theologians have always managed to reinterpret their sources in ways which have somehow made their version of Christianity correspond almost exactly to the values of their class and generation. Thus theological scholarship justified the structural social obligations of the eighteenth century world; thus it provided a Christian basis for Political Economy… [my italics]

The Ideological Alliance of Political Economy and Christian Theology, 1798–1833

The bearing of its most generally accepted religion upon problems of social-economic reorganisation in a modern " Christian " nation is obviously a difficult subject to discuss objectively, or, especially, briefly. Not merely is it almost universally affected by emotional attitudes-" prejudices," religious or iconoclastic as the case may be-or by a more mundane prudential regard for religion as a supposedly vital element in social order. Even from a strictly scientific point of view, we confront virtually unanswerable questions as to the causal relations between religion and morals, or mores, or other controlling social forces in culture and conduct. The two difficulties overlap; for there is no doubt that the belief in religion as the foundation of morality, and of social order and peace, is itself held as a prejudice or a tradition far beyond any possibility of justifying it by social-psychological analysis. Many earnest scholars and thinkers who both profess to be Christians and are recognised as such, have considered the question whether modern civilisation is Christian, or if so in what sense, and have admitted themselves puzzled as to the answer. But it remains an important fact that a large majority of the people living under West-European civilisation call themselves Christian in some sense of the word, and at least profess to believe both that moral progress since ancient times has been chiefly due to the influence of Christianity and that the New Testament writings (and/or the teachings of " the Church" based thereon) afford an answer, in principle, and in large part, to all the moral and social problems faced by mankind. It is the purpose of this

Denys Munby on Economics and Christianity

References

The Ideological Alliance of Political Economy and Christian Theology, 1798–1833

Ethics and Economic Reform. III. Christianity

The Disordered Economic Thinking of the National Church

The National Church and the Social Order