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Time for a break?: On Tanner’s vision of temporal discontinuity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2025

David Newton Open the ORCID record for David Newton [Opens in a new window]
David Newton*
Affiliation:
Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University, Durham, UK
*
Email: david.newton@elydiocese.org
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Abstract

This article begins by critiquing Kathryn Tanner’s Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism on two fronts. It suggests that her presentation of ‘Financially Dominated Capitalism’ (FDC) is problematically one-dimensional, and it takes issue with her theological construal of time. The article then argues for an alternative temporal vision which both makes better sense of Christian experience and finds resonance with economic policy proposals that undercut FDC.

Keywords

capitalismeconomyTannertime
Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , First View , pp. 1 - 10
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Kathryn Tanner, Economy of Grace (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005); and idem, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

2 Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 11.

3 Diane Coyle points out that derivatives (as a market of tradable contracts) did not exist in 1970. By 2010, the derivatives markets had a nominal value of $1,200 trillion. Diane Coyle, Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), p. 24.

4 Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 13.

5 Coyle, Cogs and Monsters, p. 28.

6 Kathryn Blanchard, ‘Review: Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism’, Studies in Christian Ethics, 34 (2021), p. 575.

7 Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 19.

8 Ibid., p. 20.

9 Ibid., p. 22. Such disciplining became unusually apparent with the spike on UK guilts following the budget of Kwasi Kwarteng in September 2022.

10 Ibid., p. 9.

11 Ibid., p. 10.

12 Ibid., p. 35.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., p. 64.

15 Ibid., p. 25.

16 Ibid., p. 105.

17 André Orléan, The Empire of Value: A New Foundation for Economics, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (London: MIT Press, 2014), p. 203.

18 Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 114.

19 Ibid., p. 154.

20 Elena Esposito, The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011), p. 47.

21 Philip Goodchild, ‘Culture and Machine: Reframing Theology and Economics’, Modern Theology, 36 (2020), p. 393.

22 Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 20; cf. p. 112.

23 Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 123.

24 Ibid., p. 125.

25 As quoted by Mark Carney, Value(s): Building a Better World for All (London: William Collins, 2021), p. 395. Carney points out that shareholders are explicitly not owners; they are rather the company’s residual claimants.

26 See Carney, Value(s), p. 397.

27 Ho, Liquidated, 3.

28 Ibid. p, 6.

29 Ibid. p, 11.

30 Ibid. p. 168.

31 Ibid.

32 Peggy M. Lee, ‘A Comparative Analysis of Layoff Announcements and Stock Price Reactions in the United States and Japan’, Strategic Management Journal,18 (1997), pp. 879–94.

33 Carney, Value(s), p. 398.

34 See ibid.

35 Michael Porter, On Competition, Updated and expanded edn. (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2008), p. 499.

36 See Carney, Value(s), pp. 396–7.

37 Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 10.

38 Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1997), p. 38.

39 Ibid., p. 58.

40 Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 31.

41 Ibid., pp. 30-31.

42 Ibid., p. 31.

43 Ibid., p. 54.

44 Ibid., p. 59.

45 Ibid., p. 126; cf. p. 159, where Tanner clarifies that she does not mean that the future should not be thought about at all; rather, ‘The future requires its own special attention’, as something radically discontinuous from the present.

46 Ibid., p. 130.

47 Ibid., p. 131.

48 Ibid., p. 157.

49 Ibid., p. 160.

50 Tanner, Theories of Culture, 115.

51 Ibid., p. 117.

52 John E. Thiel, ‘Money Matters: A Response to Devin Singh and Kathryn Tanner’, Modern Theology,36 (2020), p. 377.

53 Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 56.

54 See Samuel Wells, Transforming Fate into Destiny: The Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 1998).

55 Thiel, ‘Money Matters’, p. 377.

56 Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 202.

57 Ibid. p. 91.

58 Tanner, ‘Response to the Respondents’, p. 407.

59 Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 31.

60 Ibid., p. 219.

61 See, for example, Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Prime in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 135–51; idem, ‘Taking Time for Peace: The Ethical Significance of the Trivial’, in Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World and Living In Between (Eugene: Wipf, 2010), pp. 253–66; idem, ‘Timeful Friends: Living with the Handicapped’, in Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), pp. 143–56; idem, ‘The End of Sacrifice: An Apocalyptic Politics’, in Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics and Life (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2013), pp. 22–36.

62 See Duncan B. Forrester, ‘The Church and the Concentration Camp: Some Reflections on Moral Community’ in Mark Thiessen Nation and Samuel Wells (eds.), Faithfulness and Fortitude: Conversation with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), pp. 189–207, for an account of how both the church and the concentration camp are unsuccessful in the task of formation. See also John Thomson, The Ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas: A Christian Theology of Liberation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

63 See Hauerwas, ‘Timeful Friends’, pp. 143–56. See also idem, ‘Taking Time for Peace’, pp. 258–63, which Hauerwas considers his best essay on peace; idem, ‘Explaining Christian Nonviolence: Notes for a Conversation with John Milbank and John Howard Yoder’, in Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (London: SPCK, 2004), pp. 169–84.

64 Tanner, ‘Response to the Respondents’, p. 403.

65 See Luc Boltanski and Éve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2005), pp. xxviii–xxix.

66 Blanchard, ‘Review’, p. 577.