Could Business Be Good News?

By reminding us of the inequalities which result from our economic system, this annual publication prompts something of a referendum on the moral status of business. The discussion occurs in primarily political terms, with reference to economic communities, ideologies and structures. For some, it is good news, not only for those named on the list, but for our national economy too. Others sound the alarm, echoing the words of one politician who alleged an economic crisis owing to “the cost of greed.” Yet these political terms, necessarily sweeping in nature, are not the only ones available to us. They were not the terms on which I first encountered business, nor, I intend to suggest, do they capture the primary grounds on which Christians should enquire into the moral character of for-profit endeavours.

I invite you, therefore, to join me on a reflection, one modelled loosely on my own intellectual journey. Let us consider how we as Christians might come to understand the human work taking place in companies and in markets as something which “fundamentally belongs to Christ and serves him already.”¹ This journey will turn out to be one of clarifying what is really being asked. As my title puts it, we begin by asking: Could business be good news? By the end, our question will have taken on a new, more distinct form: how might the good news, that is, the Christian gospel, enable the realm of business also to be good news? And the answer, as with all good answers, will turn out to be simple in form and far-reaching in consequence. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us begin with my teenage self, and a first foray in business.

The Young Enterprise Scheme provided the impetus for me, while in high school, to turn my hand to the work of company-building. Encouraged and equipped to become a “CEO”, I received this challenge as good news precisely because it was a challenge: an opportunity to exercise my agency and contribute something to the world. As modest as that contribution turned out to be, the work was real: conceptualise, and then realise, a product that regular people would buy; coordinate with suppliers, execute a manufacturing process and secure sales channels—and with any luck, customers. Profit—and often homework—was a distant reality. But I was working with my friends, and success was a secondary consideration. We were testing ideas, learning new skills, and encountering all manner of thought-provoking people. I can still vividly remember receiving our first inbound email from a retailer who was interested in stocking our product. To us, that was indeed good news!

Thus, my first response to the question “Could business be good news?” was a whole-hearted, if largely unreflective, Yes. It was given on intuitive and personal grounds which at the time I lacked the tools to transcend. Business was good news for me, because that was how I encountered it. While this response far from exhausts all that we could say about the moral nature of business, let me suggest that it is a legitimate and productive place for us to begin our reflection. Oliver O’Donovan, in his account of the moral life, describes our basic human experience as one of awakening.² By God’s grace we act through an encounter with a world which precedes us and whose moral content is independent of us. The theological significance of this reality will bear out in the course of our reflection. For now, I encourage you to respond to my story of encounter with one or more of your own: recall what might have been for you an early and substantive experience of business. Perhaps you were working a first job, becoming a loyal customer, or making an investment. Did you experience business to be good news in those moments, or not? And could you identify, then or now, what led you to this response? Perhaps it was the joy of a regular meeting with friends over a cup of well-made coffee, or the pressure of managing a budget while earning minimum wage. Finally, how do you make sense of this experience in the context of how you view business today?

Though encounters like yours and mine are essential to the task of moral reflection, they are often overlooked in favour of explanatory theories or narratives. This was the case in my Young Enterprise community, where a moral theory about business functioned as a shared narrative to support our belief that business was good news. We told a story that understood the work of making and of selling simply as an exercise in problem-solving. People have problems, and, in a free market, the only businesses which may exist are those which can best solve said problems. As far as moral narratives go, this one has the strength of emphasising the sociality and dependency which are inherent to any commercial endeavour. No-one can turn a profit, nor less revenue, without real humans as customers and suppliers, nor without structures like the tax system and a whole host of public goods. There is, in other words, no such thing as a “self-made” man or woman. So, we might conclude: business is good news because by it problems are solved, needs are met, and impediments to living well are overcome.

Yet business-as-problem-solving is also subject to several important questions. To start with, does it provide an adequate description of the full range of today’s economic activity? What problem does TikTok, for example, solve? Do we really need yet another provider of luxury sunglasses? We know by observation that businesses are highly capable of inventing problems, and that some companies only exist because of problems created by others.³ Genuine solutions to problems which impede human flourishing may be good news, but it seems that our economic lives increasingly involve goods and services which do not fit this description. Following this intuition leads us to a further question about the moral nature of commercial problem-solving. Are we really serving others if, whatever laudable motivations we may hold, we are most basically driven by our own profit?⁴ Critiques of this form, according to economist and theologian Mary Hirschfeld, address the central insight of mainstream economics after Adam Smith: that there is a productive tension between self-interest and the service of others.⁵ The force of the critique turns on a moral evaluation of self-interest; a worthwhile question, but one which we cannot pursue here, except to note that it is theologically contested. For Thomas Aquinas, for example, limited self-interest may be permitted, so long as it is ordered to a higher good such as provision for one’s family.⁶ For others such as Martin Luther, self-interest must always be treated with suspicion because of the untrustworthy nature of human motivation.⁷ Whichever position you prefer, both agree that human self-interest in a world marked by sin is not a good that should be pursued for its own sake.

Our questions have revealed that this narrative of business-as-problem-solving attempts to secure the moral good of business as a derivative of two other goods. The first is the good of solutions themselves and the improvements they bring to our lives, and the second is the altruism which is implied when serving others. Both are genuine goods and legitimate aspects of problem-solving in community and therefore can be frequently observed in many commercial activities. However, to name such problem-solving as the chief good of business would be to overlook the much more contested reality in which each of these genuine goods are found. Neither the motivations of men and women working in business, nor the problems they seek to solve, are consistently or decisively good. So while we can and should recognise that genuine problems are solved through business, we must conclude that this theory alone does not secure business its virtue.

So far we have pursued our question—“could business be good news?”—by asking about the nature of business. We have done so with reference first to encounter, and then to theory. Our conclusion from these limited accounts might be that business appears to be something of a mixed good. My encounter as a teenager was marked by a simple goodness, though no doubt others can cite experiences to the contrary. Likewise, attempts to theorise the good of business—whether by reference to problem-solving, as we have considered, or by alternative accounts of efficiency, solidarity or even human dignity—are instructive but do not fully settle the matter, instead affirming the mixed morality of motivations and outcomes. Perhaps to us as Christians this conclusion should not be surprising. In the Augustinian tradition which shapes much of Western moral theology, we are familiar with the problem of dirty hands. It is well summarised by Brian Brock: “in our daily lives we do not face good and evil in ‘pure’ forms between which ethical theory helps us to choose, but in historically particular constellations in which good and evil aspects and trajectories are hopelessly intermixed.”⁸ Such a conclusion is helpful in enabling us to name reality eloquently—though we might borrow Brock’s language to say that it can also leave us feeling rather hopeless.

Let us return, then, to our initial question. We have pursued the moral nature of business using a common-sense method, one that so far has produced only a frustrating result. Could the Christian tradition provide us with an alternative method? Fortunately, I think it does. That method, which will turn out to challenge the framing of our question, leads us back to my own story.

Several years after my first encounter with business, I began the Venn Residential Fellowship, where I was able to engage in sustained reflection on a question related to the one which we have been considering together. On the Fellowship, we asked: “how might the whole of my life be impacted by the gospel?” To answer this question I began with the whole of my life: work, hobbies, school, and family were all examined as candidates for transformation by the good news of God’s rule and reign in Jesus. Yet the conclusions which I came to felt too much like a set of New Years’ resolutions—exciting but ultimately unrealistic lifestyle changes. They seemed to have more in common with a self-help book than the promises of Scripture. It was not until several weeks into the Fellowship that, through an important reading and a series of conversations, I was properly confronted with the fact that the person of Jesus precedes me in all things. This is a simple statement with far-reaching consequences. I had of course grasped it intellectually—no doubt God as my creator precedes me—but I had failed to feel its full weight: that outside of the creating and redeeming work of Christ, my life contains no independent ground for either existence or meaning. My only hope in answering my question therefore, was not in theorising about changes to my life, but in seeking an encounter with the fullness of the gospel through the one who “is the good news in person.”⁹ In putting aside my own ideas, I began to experience a glimmer of what Christ may have meant when he said that “he who loses his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 16:25).

I share this story to suggest that its lesson may apply equally well to the question we are pursuing together. In our investigation of the moral character of business we have asked about the nature of business, seeking to understand whether it might be good, and therefore constitute good news. We have not begun with good news itself. Were we to, we would find ourselves facing the rather different question: “What is good news, and might it include business?” My experience during the Fellowship suggests that this will be a more fruitful line of thinking. Scripture, too attests to the importance of asking the right questions, and of encountering the gospel as the source of all truth. In John 18, we observe both an encounter and a re-framed question. Jesus, while being sentenced by Pontius Pilate, claims that the truth is revealed by his teaching. Pilate’s response refuses the opportunity for encounter which is quite literally standing in front of him, preferring instead the safety of a theoretical question. “What is truth?” he asks, the absurdity of the question exposed by the fact that it is addressed to Truth himself, Jesus the Christ. Pilate’s question is self-serving, because it presumes to establish a ground for truth that does not depend on God’s creating, sustaining and redeeming work. His words seek to grasp the truth, rather than being transformed by it. A similar dynamic is at play, I think, in the pursuit of our original question about the good of business. Wring that question for all it is worth, and all we can arrive at, given sufficient honesty, is a profound moral uncertainty. More likely, we, like Pilate, will begin to seek an independent ground on which to justify our human action in business. In order to arrive at its true answer, the question itself must be thrust aside for an encounter with the risen Christ to whom all of human life, including the work of business, is ultimately in service. In that encounter we find a God who intervenes in the midst of our moral uncertainty, both “to will and to act in order to fulfil his good purpose” (Philippians 2:13).

So, as I have earlier suggested, the answer to our question turns out to be rather simple. Business can indeed be good news, insofar as it is at all times and in all places in submission to, caught up in, the good news of the life, death, resurrection, ascension and promised return of Jesus Christ, through whom all things have been created and in whom all things hold together. This answer on its own may for some be a frustrating one: what, then, do we actually do in business? How do we resist sin and evil and work for the good? These are good questions, and ones which we should ask and attempt to answer. In some commercial acts, just as in all other areas of life, the good news of the gospel will stand in condemnatory judgement of sin and evil. We should pray for the Spirit’s guidance to discern such acts, and work to curtail them—especially in our own businesses. In others, glory will abound; and in these acts we should rejoice and pray and work for multiplication. But I encourage you to consider that this reality, the totalising reality of the good news—of human action liberated and empowered by the coming of God’s rule and reign, His kingdom—is the first and most important thing that we can say about business, and a proclamation to which we must constantly return.

A central insight of twentieth-century political theology was the reminder that we must always be on guard against too closely associating any human system of government with the fullness of God’s justice. The same conclusion must be applied to economic systems. Neither socialism nor capitalism, nor any alternative, can fully realise God’s kingdom, though aspects of either may more or less closely approximate the demands of Jesus’s teaching. There can be no truly “Christian business” just as there can be no truly “Christian nation.” Yet we cannot deny the substantive call for transformation, both personal and social, made by the gospel. Repent, Christ exhorted, meaning quite literally that we are to change our ways. Let us, therefore, close our reflection on the good news of the gospel for business by suggesting briefly, three further questions which may illustrate the ways in which the good news can shape our work in companies and in markets.

Firstly, how might the submission of the business world to the gospel affect the way that we view commercial outcomes? Martin Luther, in an important sermon on trade, reminds us that any connection between our work and its fruits is better attributed to God’s providence than to any kind of economic laws. These laws, though capable of some degree of explanation and prediction, “fundamentally misattribute the source of such outcomes to human action rather than an active and caring God.”¹⁰ Might this reality, for example, empower Christians in business to approach risk and return from a different perspective to that of standard corporate finance? In doing so, what new possibilities might be open to us?

A second question asks how our daily work might be transformed by the fact that we as men and women working in business are ourselves addressed directly and personally by the gospel. The good news is for us, not just for the world in an abstract sense. It therefore addresses our motivations and our will, which, even for mature Christians, require constant examination. Might the witness of the Holy Spirit enable Christians in business to become more aware of the deceptive and obscure motivations which can at times influence our commercial decisions? Might we, as Zaccheaus did, recognise concrete opportunities for repentance which implicate our businesses and their assets?

Finally, how might the ethical commands of the gospel affect the way that we relate to our economic neighbours, be they customers, suppliers or employees? The commands of the Sermon on the Mount, for example, address the way that we use property. Catholic Social Thought interprets Christ’s teaching to suggest that while we may freely choose how to use our property, in doing so we have an obligation to serve the common good. What would it mean for Christians to apply this teaching not only to individual, but also commercial, property—and not just to land and buildings, but, for example, intellectual property, software and other intangibles?

These questions, and many more like them, deserve greater reflection, prayer and conversation. Fortunately, there are communities dedicated to pursuing them, such as Venn’s Centre for Business and Leadership. However, my choice to raise them only briefly in this article is an intentional one. In order to have any confidence in our answers to these practical questions, we must return to the reality that the only hope for any real moral good in business is contained in the fact that the economic sphere is under God’s sovereignty, and that our work in it is ultimately directed by him and for his good purpose. And confidence is precisely what this recognition does give us: confidence that God is working in and through our businesses, that the Holy Spirit is active in our lives, and that our work is caught up in Christ’s work to redeem the fullness of human flourishing in relationship with him. Let me encourage you therefore, in closing, to seek out Jesus, to encounter him, and to let his lordship begin to shape your vision for the possibilities open to us through our work together in business. My hope is that you will find, as I have, that in this—as in all of God’s creation—good news abounds.

¹ Sean Doherty, Theology and Economic Ethics: Martin Luther and Arthur Rich in Dialogue (Oxford, 2014), 199.
² Oliver O’Donovan, Self World and Time: Ethics as Theology Vol. I (Michigan, 2013), 2.
³ The ability for businesses to shape our desires––often for the worse––is increasingly well-described. See, for example: Jack Fuller, “Desire and the Ethics of Advertising” (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2016)
⁴ Of course in many cases there are plural motivations for solving problems. However, we can secure this point by simply observing how our behaviour is shaped by remuneration. Reasons over and above profit may genuinely motivate us to solve problems, but how often would (or do) we take on such work without any compensation?
⁵ Mary Hirschfeld, Aquinas and the Market: Towards a Humane Economy (Cambridge, 2018), 5.
⁶ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2a 2ae, q. 25, aa. 4–5.
⁷ Doherty, Theology and Economic Ethics, 51.
⁸ Brian Brock, Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Grand Rapids, 2007), 90.
⁹ D.C. Schindler, The Politics of the Real: The Church Between Liberalism and Integralism (Steubenville, 2021), 15.
¹⁰ Doherty, Theology and Economic Ethics, 152.