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Wrong Regent
We thank Donald Hettinga ["A Wrinkle in Faith," May/June] for his generous error in situating Madeleine L'Engle at Regent University as a writer-in-residence. We would love to claim such an honor, but it properly belongs to the highly esteemed Regent College in Vancouver. Maybe we can try to kidnap and claim Luci Shaw next.

Terry Lindval
Regent University
Virginia Beach, Va.

Everything for Sale
As a Christian economist, I appreciate Books & Culture's coverage of popular press discussions about public policy. That said, Jean Elshtain's comments on economics and "the free market" [May/June] fell short of the standard you have set.

First, Elshtain mischaracterizes economic analysis—in particular, the concepts of "maximizing utility" and "marginal analysis." These entail more than purely selfish behaviors. Even charitable acts are utility-maximizing when one donates money instead of making a purchase. Further, Public Choice economists do not argue that a politician's only motive is re-election—just that re-election is a primary consideration. (Until Public Choice's advent in the early 1960s, politicians were typically assumed to be "public servants.")

Second, Elshtain mischaracterizes economic markets. In a word, economic markets feature voluntary, mutually beneficial trades. In most cases, this does not result in a "win-lose proposition." Ironically, it is the alternative—political markets—which typically feature win-lose propositions. Government's primary function is to take something from A to give it to B in return for votes or money—at best, a zero-sum scenario.

Third, Elshtain implicitly mischaracterizes the market for health care. Because of the level of government intervention in that market, blaming our health-care problems on the function of markets is, at best, simplistic. Health care is greatly subsidized by government (e.g., as a fringe benefit, employer-provided insurance is immune to income taxation); government artificially increases the demand for medical services through Medicare and Medicaid; government allows the ama to have a labor market cartel, increasing its members' incomes and health-care costs; and so on. When the government is so active in a market, it is poor reasoning to blame that market's woes on economics.

Fourth, Elshtain mischaracterizes the cost-benefit analysis associated with regulation. One can dismiss analyses which "cost-out the value of a human life," but the fact remains that regulations have costs and benefits that should be estimated in some way. Presumably, if the costs outweigh the benefits, then we should not pursue the regulation. That the costs are enumerated in a certain way is not particularly relevant; the relevant point is that costs should be—and are typically not—considered at all in arguing public policy matters.

Fifth, Elshtain misunderstands that markets for goods or services in demand always function—the questions are whether they function well or not and by what criteria they operate. To note, the argument that "babies and vital organs should not be treated as commodities" is wishful thinking. Whether or not they should be, they will be. The only question is whether price or nonprice considerations will be used to ration the available supply. As it is currently, with vital organs, waiting in line (and perhaps dying) is the legal (ethical?) means of rationing. And ironically, everyone except the donor profits from the transaction.

Finally, on a lighter note, Elshtain mischaracterizes Robert Kuttner's profession and training. He is not an economist!

D. Eric Schansberg
Indiana University-New Albany
New Albany, Ind.

Jean Elshtain replies:
Unfortunately, Eric Schansberg's letter highlights nearly all the concerns I expressed in my article. He argues that the concepts of "maximizing utility" and "marginal analysis" actually "entail more than purely selfish behaviors. Even charitable acts are utility-maximizing when one donates money instead of making a purchase." Here he precisely makes my point, namely, that we radically misunderstand and distort the nature of a whole range of human activities if we describe them within the language of econometric analysis. That language is reductionistic and impoverishing. No more caritas. No more stewardship. Rather, "utility maximization." At least since Saint Augustine, who argued powerfully along these lines, we have known that how we describe the world and our activities within it helps to determine our very selves, including our self-understanding. If everything I do is a form of utility-maximization, I have reduced all of life to a single, crude scale and can no longer order goods in relation to beauty or truth or a common good or anything else.

Second, Schansberg sees markets as a world of "voluntary, mutually beneficial trades." Notice there is no pressure, no coercive "choice," no winning and losing. The market emerges as entirely benign. Government, by contrast, becomes the win-lose world. But it is government as understood within the framework of zero-sum analysis that is thus crudely mischaracterized. In fact, politics and government at its most decent is a world in which we find a way to adjudicate our differences and to compromise on most if not all things.

Third, everyone knows the current health-care situation is a disaster in many respects. It seems to me simplistic to see government intervention as the fly in the ointment. There is blame enough to go around, but to presume that the profit-driven bottom line for insurance companies and HMOs isn't part of the problem is naïve.

Fourth and finally, any attempt to "cost out" a human life in dollars and cents bears within it a mischievous understanding of human beings and potentially pernicious implications socially and politically. For Schansberg simply to give up—utterly relinquish—any ethical holding the line on the treatment of babies and vital organs as commodities (a stance he calls "wishful thinking" on my part) is to capitulate wholly to the terms of a world that is so far from the Christian understanding of the dignity of human persons in so many ways it should make us tremble for the future.

Exclusion & Embrace
It was with real excitement that I opened the November/December 1997 issue of Books & Culture (the mails are slow!) and discovered Roger Olson's review of Miroslav Volf's book Exclusion & Embrace. Living and working as I do in North Africa, and having painfully witnessed (and tried to mitigate) precisely the kinds of conflicts Volf addresses, I had been deeply challenged and helped by reading his book. But I was disappointed to find that the review did not seem to engage fully with the central arguments of the book, and at some points misrepresented Volf's position.

Volf is asking questions that evangelical theologians have rarely asked, and that Volf thinks other theologians may have answered wrongly. He is exploring the fluid nature of identity and selfhood in relation to the other. How is my identity related to the communities of which I am a part and to the communities with which my community is in conflict, in the context of mass-scale ethnic, religious, and gender-related conflict and oppression?

Volf's answer is that as Christians we must develop "double vision" that tries to see the world both from our own point of view and from the other group's point of view—thus making space within our selves for the other—while not necessarily agreeing with the other view (thus not dissolving our own selfhood). And we must learn self-giving in that reconciling, forgiving embrace that is inseparable from our commitment to justice—preferring to overcome violence with self-giving love, rather than to surrender to the automatism of revenge.

This matter of the relationship of justice to embrace is one area where Olson's review seems to misunderstand Volf. The review discusses Volf's views on forgiveness and forgetting of genocidal evil without acknowledging that Volf sees this as absolutely inseparable from the pursuit of justice between perpetrators and victims. This is what Volf calls "cheap reconciliation." Contrary to some liberation theologians (though not Gutierrez, he notes), Volf emphasizes that liberation must be subordinated to love, but he nonetheless believes passionately that liberation and justice must be vigorously pursued, recognizing that God is "impartially partial" to the poor and oppressed. "Grace affirms justice in the act of transcending it."

Olson also misrepresents Volf's discussion of "forgetting" by putting the focus on God's forgetting and whether this is compatible with divine omniscience. Olson seems not to understand the careful nuancing with which Volf uses the term "forget." Volf points out that in Genesis 41:51, Joseph says he has "forgotten" his past victimization, but this does not mean that Joseph literally does not know what was done to him. And Jeremiah 31:34 explicitly states that in some way God "forgets" our iniquities. Was Jeremiah also inadequate in his "understanding of divine omniscience" as the review suggests about Volf? Volf's point is that if victims of genocide, rape, etc. are forced for eternity in the New Jerusalem to remember the horrible crimes committed against them, then "heaven" will have hellish characteristics for these people. Volf's "forgetting" is the renunciation (made possible by God's grace) of the power those memories have to continue to oppress us in the core of our identity, not a forgetting that either pretends that the evil did not happen or calls into question whether the omniscient God knows that it happened.

I was particularly concerned by Olson's reference to Volf's offense to the "conservative guardians of tradition" by his "enthusiastic refusal to condemn universalism." It seems to me that much of the last chapter of Volf's book focuses precisely on explaining what is profoundly wrong—even oppressive— about universalism. To document Volf's offense, Olson cites a couple of quotations from Volf, which he pulls not from Volf's main text but from the fine print of two footnotes. In one footnote it is in the context of arguing against universalism that Volf says that "Though those who have been touched by God's love ought to hope for a universal nonrefusal, if they are not blind to the human condition they will be hesitant to count on it." Olson then cites another quotation, which he describes as "Volf's last word on the subject." But checking Volf's footnote from which the quotation is taken, one finds that Volf describes this not as his own view but as something he has heard others say.

Volf's real last word on the subject of universalism is this: "It takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God's refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind."

As I write this letter from an urban slum neighborhood in the Sahara desert, I would echo Volf's critique of comfortable suburban theologies. Whether we agree with Volf's ideas or not, I would hope that we might at least understand them accurately enough to respond to them meaningfully in the real world, where problems of identity and otherness daily stain so many lands and lives with blood.

Joseph Cumming
Nouakchott, Mauritaniia

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
July/August 1998, Vol.4, No. 4, Page 5

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