Commercium Admirabile

In my Lutheran tradition of Christian theology, we are especially fond of “the joyful exchange,” a notion that dates back to the early church but that Luther himself probably got from the medieval mystics like Bernard of Clairvaux.

Describing the nature of faith, grace, and salvation, Luther writes in his treatise The Freedom of a Christian: “Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ’s, while grace, life, and salvation will be the soul’s; for if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his bride’s and bestow upon her the things that are his. If he gives her his body and very self, how shall he not give her all that is his? And if he takes the body of the bride, how shall he not take all that is hers?”*

In recent years I’ve heard a certain disdain for this metaphor because of its marital imagery. Jesus is the groom, so the sinner is therefore a bride. The fact that Luther doesn’t actually affiliate sinner with bride on account of the latter being female tends to be lost on such critics. Luther is capable of shocking invective, but he is never careless or random. If he left out any inherent connection between femaleness and sinfulness here, it’s because he disregarded it as irrelevant to the point at hand.

What ought to shock, actually, is the economic metaphor that lies at the root of this image. The reason for using a bridge and a groom in the legal custom that the property of each respective spouse becomes the other’s. They are no longer distinct legal or economic entities but have joined into a new, common entity. What’s his is hers, what’s hers is his.

This being the soul’s marriage with Jesus, we need not worry about all the ways actual existing human marriages can and do go wrong. Jesus goes one better than the human bridegroom: he takes legal responsibility for all that is degrading and demeaning in the bride’s dowry—sin, death, damnation—and instead places under her care all his own vast holdings—righteousness, life, and salvation. That’s what makes it a *joyful* exchange.

But, fundamentally, it is an *exchange.* Or, in Latin, commercium. As in “commerce.”

Another unfortunate tendency of my profession is to look down a long sneering nose at trade. It’s filthy lucre by definition. Everything should be gift, nothing should be trade.

I suspect any of us who live by cash and prices nowadays would absolutely hate a gift economy—not because we lack generosity, but because of its infinite potential for control, abuse, and oneupsmanship. You always owe, but you never know how much. You can never level off and be equals. When there is free trade and fixed prices, you actually cordon off a domain of gift-giving. When everything is a gift, nothing is a gift. Or to put it more precisely, a gift economy has no *free* gifts.

What I’d like to theologians to grasp is that trade is as old as humanity itself. It is at the root of the equally ancient practice of sacrifice. This is not an ugly fact to be lamented over in shame. Trade is the instantiation of mutual interdependence—whether between humanity and god(s)—that’s sacrifice—or between some humans with others—that’s what we’ve come to call the economy, a word that comes from Greek for “householding,” another interdependent arrangement.

As any economist or sociologist will tell you, closed societies stagnate. Only ones open to trade flourish, develop, grow, and excel. And get out of poverty, for that matter.

One of the moral arguments of Adam Smith and the early discovers of “capitalism” or “the invisible hand” was that everyone is improved by trading, even for goods you could make just as well or better yourself. They argued for *increased* interdependence in the form of trade as a moral good.

And the much-maligned Anselm’s theory of atonement was built on the foundation of trade, not just sacrifice but paying the cost on behalf of others out of love. He recognized that debt and trade-offs are baked into the nature of reality. But he refused to recognize God’s inability to overcome the inevitable tangles and dilemmas of this system. Christ trades in his shame in order to procure God’s greater honor, and Christ pays human debt in order to free us for loving commerce with our Lord once more.

Admirable indeed!

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Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” Luther’s Works, American Edition, 55 vols., eds. J. Pelikan and H. Lehmann (St. Louis and Philadelphia: Concordia and Fortress, 1955ff.), 31:351.