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I’ve been reading the anthropologist David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years this week. It’s a remarkable and thought-provoking work. He frames up the topic by relating a conversation he once had with an attorney who worked on behalf of anti-poverty groups. When he described his own work toward relieving Third World debt, she was confounded. “But, they’d borrowed the money! Surely one has to pay one’s debts.” Graeber notes that, even in standard economic theory, this statement isn’t always true - a lender is expected to assume some level of risk, “because otherwise what reason would lenders have not to make a stupid loan?” “Surely one has to pay one’s debts,” Graeber observes, isn’t actually an economic statement.

Rather, it’s a moral statement. After all, isn’t paying one’s debts what morality is supposed to be all about? Giving people what is due them. Accepting one’s responsibilities. Fulfilling one’s obligations to others, just as one would expect them to fulfill their obligations to you. What could be a more obvious example of shirking one’s responsibilities than reneging on a promise, or refusing to pay a debt?

Graeber latches on to this connection between morality and debt, continuing:

If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt — above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies. For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that those victims owe them something. If nothing else, they “owe them their lives” (a telling phrase) because they haven’t been killed.

I’d recommend Graeber’s book even just as an economic treatise. He challenges the basic capitalist assumptions that we Westerns have been raised with and points toward other, better ideas. (First up, he suggests: a Biblical-style Year of Jubilee where debts are forgiven. But I digress.) But when Graeber starts talking about debt obligation as a moral question, my mind immediately went to theology.

He paid a debt He did not owe, I owed a debt I could not pay…

Within the Western church and especially among American Evangelicalism, the language of debt is inescapable. The essential message of salvation is framed up in just those terms: the sinner owing an infinite debt to God for offending God’s perfection; Jesus living perfectly and then dying to pay that debt on our behalf. So when Graeber devotes a chapter to “The Moral Ground of Economic Relations”, my ears perk up.

How do societies actually work?

First, he says, at the most basic level society functions on what he calls “baseline communism”:

the understanding that unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable enough, the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” will be assumed to apply.

This can be seen in the societal expectation for things as mundane as bumming a cigarette or asking for someone to pass the salt, and as great as the expectation that an able-bodied man will risk his life to save a child in peril. Society is based on this expectation of mutual contribution, he says, providing anthropological examples from cultures across the world to justify the claim. Relationships color our commercial exchanges, too - for example, merchants reducing prices for the needy.

This is one of the same reasons why shopkeepers in poor neighborhoods are almost never of the same ethnic group as their customers; it would be almost impossible for a merchant who grew up in the neighborhood to make money, as they would be under constant pressure to give financial breaks… to their impoverished relatives and school chums.

“Exchange… implies formal equality [between parties]… This is precisely why kings have such trouble with it.” It was about this point that my ears really perked up. “When objects of material wealth pass back and forth between superiors and inferiors as gifts or payments, the key principle seems to be that the sorts of things given on each side should be considered fundamentally different in quality, their relative value impossible to quantify — the result being that there is no way to even conceive of a squaring of accounts.” This rings true to how we talk about the debt of sin to God. But if squaring accounts with God is inconceivable, then how is it moral to even suggest that it is the sinner’s responsibility to do so, on pain of eternal damnation? Isn’t this argument, as Graeber described early on, the violent powerful party using the language of morality to convince the victim that they are the ones in the wrong?

What, then, is debt?

Graeber is answering this with economics in mind, but read this argument with soteriology in mind, too.

Debt is a very specific thing, and it arises from very specific situations. It first requires a relationship between two people who do not consider each other fundamentally different sorts of being, who are at least potential equals, who are equals in those ways that are really important, and who are not currently in a state of equality—but for whom there is some way to set matters straight.

If we accept Graeber’s definition here, it would be impossible for a human to be “in debt” to an omnipotent God for his sins, if only because God and the human are in no sense potential equals. He continues:

This means that there is no such thing as a genuinely unpayable debt. If there was no conceivable way to salvage the situation, we wouldn’t be calling it a “debt.”… This is what makes situations of effectively unpayable debt so difficult and so painful. Since creditor and debtor are ultimately equals, if the debtor cannot do what it takes to restore herself to equality, there is obviously something wrong with her; it must be her fault.

But aren’t all human interactions forms of exchange? Graeber says no, because many forms of human interaction are within in the framework of reciprocal relationship that glues our society together. Exchange is different:

…exchange implies equality, but it also implies separation. It’s precisely when the money changes hands, when the debt is canceled, that equality is restored and both parties can walk away and have nothing further to do with each other.

Debt is what happens in between: when the two parties cannot yet walk away from each other, because they are not yet equal. But it is carried out in the shadow of eventual equality. Because achieving that equality, however, destroys the very reason for having a relationship, just about everything interesting happens in between.

So once debts are resolved and the parties can walk away, what basis do we have for societal relationships? Graeber asks. As a preliminary answer, he quotes from 16th century monk François Rabelais’s book Gargantua and Pantagruel, where Pantagruel quotes the Apostle Paul: “owe no man anything, save mutual love and affection”— and the response to this freedom is genuine love and thanksgiving in return.

OK, Chris, where is all this going?

So, back to sin and salvation, humans and God. If Graeber is right here about debt and relationships, it doesn’t make sense for Christians to talk about sin as a debt owed to God. After all, we are not equals with God who just need to get our accounts balanced. The same evangelicals who would press hardest on our unpayable debt to God would also stress the infinite distinction between the omnipotent God and the miserable mortal creature. And if the payment of the debt then gives those equal parties the opportunity to “walk away”, with no further obligation to have a relationship, why would this paid-off state be desirable? In Graeber’s anthropological framework, God lording this debt of sin over pitiful humans is more akin to the vile Mafioso than a loving creator and savior.

At this point I would anticipate Evangelical readers to object that the “anthro” in Graeber’s expertise means “man”, and God isn’t man, and therefore this whole line of my reasoning is bunk. But I think we can do better than that. The Bible talks about God in human terms, using human analogies. So if this book that Christians profess as God-breathed uses human illustrations, we should evaluate them that way rather than just write them off when they don’t support our other theological assumptions.

A Better Metaphor

This post is already far too long, so let me just briefly suggest that a better metaphor for the problem of sin is the one our Orthodox brethren have proclaimed for centuries: sin as a disease that humans are unable to get rid of, and salvation the healing and cure. This metaphor better represents the actual dynamics of the God/human relationship. It establishes humans not as beings who must be failed and immoral because we just can’t manage to repay that debt, but as beloved children, stained and sick, who have a relationship permanently maintained by a loving parent who holds the cure.

…in the Orthodox model, sin is missing the mark; it is a distortion or a disease that needs therapy. Sin has no temporal and eternal debt per se, nor must it be “worked” off. One does not do “penance” in the Orthodox Church, but rather one seeks to be healed of their passions, their imperfections. Thus we use the language that compares the Church to a hospital and views sin in medical terms: sickness and cure. — Orthodox Catechism Project

This is really good news: that God loves us, calls us his children, and seeks to heal us of our compulsion to behave in ways that are not compatible with human flourishing.