There is an old idea that Christians used to favor and now, broadly speaking, disfavor — merit. Merit refers to a reward, and in this context, a reward from God for some good action or toil. Since the Reformation, the idea that a human being can obtain merit from the Almighty has appeared as a horrible presumption by which a man believes he can purchase God’s favor with good works. God’s love is not earned, we would say, but given freely, yea, gratuitously! Christ, dying upon the cross not for the worthy, but for sinners, has shown this once and for all.
It would take quite a work to defend “merit” against this charge, but for our purposes, two arguments will suffice. The first is simply that the gratuity of God and His offering of rewards are not mutually contradictory. A wealthy man, in a fit of romance, might offer a thousand dollars for every smile directed towards the elderly of his hometown. This would be a gift. No one, however well-dentured, deserves a thousand dollars for a smile. In fact, one ought to have been practicing the virtue of amiability and smiling in the first place. Christ’s words apply well: “We are unprofitable servants, we have done that which we ought to do” (Luke 17:10). Nevertheless, if the man really means it, and the thing is not a joke, then I could smile and receive my thousand, not with arrogance or presumption, but with a blush, knowing full well I only “deserve it” because I have been gratuitously made deserving.
This is something of how Christians used to understand the economy of grace. Man cannot deserve God’s grace, except that God, in His great love for us, has offered it as a reward. By grace, grace is made meritable. As the adult stoops to the level of the child, rewarding it with lavish praise for putting away its blocks, so God makes us undeservingly deserving of His love. He loves us so much, and so understands our nature, that He puts salvation up for sale, allowing us to merit with finite acts His infinite gifts. St. Thomas Aquinas says all this rather simply: “Our action has the character of merit only on the presupposition of the Divine ordination.” God does not owe us a reward, plainly and simply. He owes it to Himself to keep the promises of reward that He has made to us in all gratuity “inasmuch as it is right that His will should be carried out” (I-II Q. 14 a. 1). As the Letter to the Hebrews says, “Though we speak thus, yet in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things that belong to salvation. For God is not so unjust as to overlook your work and the love which you showed for His sake in serving the saints, as you still do.”
The second argument is simply to provide Biblical evidence of the first. God rewards men. He does not have to, but He does. After Abraham rejects a reward from the king of Sodom, he is promised one by the Heavenly King: “Thy reward will be very great.”
The rejection of this concept of merit has not banished it from our existence, but disoriented it, redirecting it towards material goods. We have not ceased to strive for a reward, but now we do not expect it from God, having limited Him to providing gratuitous and arbitrary love and redemption without doing it through any kind of economy. We expect it from our employers, from the stock market, and from our investments.
It is a fact that American economic life operates in direct denial of the commands of Christ. Jesus says “do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth” (Matthew 6:19). Our entire economy is built, at its most foundational level, on the idea that men ought to be motivated to store up treasures for themselves, and that great stores of capital are necessary, not simply for great works, but for the very subsistence of workers. Few, if any Christians, would call a large savings account anything but “responsible.” Likewise, Jesus says “beware of all covetousness, for a man’s life does not consist in an abundance of possessions” (Luke 12:15). But we laud covetousness, calling it “competition,” or just “the market,” and we require massive amounts of advertising to keep our economies in motion through the production of the desire for an abundance of new possessions. Jesus says not to be anxious about material possessions — we are anxious indeed.
We are economic apostates from the true Church of Christ, but not plainly and simply. For Christ has made it clear that these “basic” economic attitudes — amassing, competing, progressing, worrying — have their proper place, not in the acquisition of material goods and security, but in the attainment of spiritual merit. He does not only say “do not store up treasures for yourselves on earth” — He positively commands us to “store up treasures in Heaven.” The negation of one is the attainment of the other, as Jesus makes clear to the rich young man in the Gospel of Luke: “Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”
Capitalism is not extrinsically related to the abandonment of the concept of spiritual merit. Rather, as long as Christ ties the attainment of spiritual merit to acts of liberality and almsgiving, by which wealth is not stocked, amassed, or saved, but given away, capitalism requires the rejection of the doctrine of merit in order to function. Unless the wealthy cease using their wealth to build up a treasure-trove of good works in Heaven, they will not build up the earthly treasure-trove necessary to fund capital-intensive machines and to take ownership of the means of the world’s production.
Likewise, competition is not condemned within the Scriptures. It is encouraged. But the object of good and holy competition is not material, but spiritual. As St. Paul says, “Run in such a way as to take the prize.” When the prize is a material one, it is scarce, and to take it is to disable another from enjoying it. Therefore Paul makes a distinction: “They [compete] for a crown that is perishable, but we compete for a crown that is imperishable.” It is not towards a scarce good, but an abundant good that we are to direct the spirit of competition; we race to receive what we can all share — life with God. But once the desire to obtain spiritual merit is rendered ridiculous, the holy competition of the saints does not fade into oblivion. Like the desire to amass, it is disoriented back towards the “perishable crown” of material goods. Indeed, the necessity of success and the imperative to end up on top and to stay “one step ahead of the competition” have swollen to the status of cultural doctrines. The grasping, small-minded vices of the shopkeeping-class have come to define our national character. Competition even becomes — as in the writings of Ayn Rand — a sacred good and a moral imperative. This religious valuation of competition can only be explained if competition was disorientated from a religious object, if the race for profit runs with the speed of a race once run for blessedness. Again, the loss of the doctrine of spiritual merit is necessary for the functioning of capitalism, for if man refuses to compete in the arena of scarce goods, but orientates his drive for competition towards abundant goods, then all his progress will remain within the production of those goods which can be shared without diminishment — intellectual, artistic, and spiritual goods. This is a fair description of Christendom in the Middle Ages, which made virtually no “progress” in terms of material production and machinery, while it exploded with the production of spiritual goods.
This same system can be shown in all the economic teachings of Jesus Christ. The fear of scarcity is orientated, not towards material goods, but to spiritual ones: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” By fearing the loss of abundant goods, rather than scarce goods, the faithful would disable the basic definitions of the economists who operate under the presumption that all men fear losing what they deem best for themselves in a field of scarce goods. Likewise, Christ condemns anxiety over material goods, while the Scriptures praise anxiety orientated towards the loss of spiritual goods: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Phillippians 2:12), but “do not worry about your life” (Matthew 6:25).
The Scriptures understand capitalism better than capitalism understands itself. Capitalism is a perversion of the biblical doctrine of spiritual merit, one which reapplies the drive for abundant, immaterial goods to the pursuit of scarce, material goods. The Prosperity Gospel is simply the third movement in this symphony. In the first, Christ establishes the doctrine of spiritual merit. In the second, we abandon this doctrine, and begin seeking material merit. In the third act, we seek to integrate our covetousness with our Christianity by arguing that the attainment of material merit is the attainment of spiritual merit, or at least its sacrament. Here, to be wealthy (in material goods) is to be blessed.
This plague is ruining our economy. What this means, practically speaking, is that we will all become, and have already started to become, poor. There is no tolerance for poverty without the doctrine of spiritual merit; no way to spin a decreased GDP as a marvelous thing outside of the words of Christ. But within His dear Church, upon the firmness of His doctrines, poverty is a joy that the world cannot comprehend, an amassment of wealth, a treasure-trove, a heap, a glittering prize for which we should compete. By entering into it voluntarily, rather than remaining bourgeois in our hearts while we become proletarians in our pocketbooks, we merit. By suffering it for the sake of His Church, we merit. The goal of Christians in a time of economic collapse should not be to hide from Christ’s teachings, desperately trying to convince everyone that everything will be fine, and that further spending, amassment, anxiety and covetousness will make everyone affluent again — once this is all over. The goal of Christians should be to give of what they have, and to convert themselves and their neighbors to the doctrines of Christ, so that the coming poverty will raise a joyful noise in those who suffer it.