“The enquiry [in a chapter in Colin Gunton’s book] begins with a consideration of the concept of economy, though not that understood in the dismal and reductionist sense that characterizes so much of modernity. An interesting account of an early theological use of the concept has been given by Frances Young and David Ford in their study of the Second Letter to Corinth. From its simple and original meaning of the management of the home, the word comes to be used in the New Testament, particularly by Paul, as an explicitly financial metaphor to express forms of both human and divine action. Christology is the heart of the matter: “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor. . . . (2 Corinthians 8.9). Paul uses the idea of an economy of divine generosity to overcome human conceptions of economy based on mere reciprocity and prudence. Above all there comes into view ‘the central, generative exchange of Christ’s sufferings and death’. Through the divine economy a new human way of being in the world is realized: ‘The exchange of Christ, his costly work, which involved suffering the most intractable realities of sin and death, has generated “the power of Christ” (12.9), a new creation, a new currency which can, through the downpayment of the Spirit, be spent now in living the sort of life which Christ’s pattern of humility and weakness laid down.’ [Frances Young and David F. Ford, Meaning and Truth in 2 Corinthians (London: SPCK, 1987), p. 175.]
“After such a beginning, it happened that a household word, along with its transferred application to the organization of finances and the running of the state, was commandeered for theology by some of the early Fathers — Ignatius, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, for example — to express aspects of the divine dispensation. The concept of economy became a way of integrating a plurality, of maintaining the richness and diversity of the ways of the one God towards and in the world. Irenaeus has a rich conception of the divine economy. Against the gnostic divorce of creation from redemption, he argued that the different aspects of God’s agency formed a unity through time and space: from beginning in creation to the final eschatological completion, which was, however, anticipated in Christ and in life in the Spirit. Creation, fall, redemption and eschatology all therefore had due part, thought together in their distinctness, but not separateness, and interrelatedness. By means of his trinitarian conception of the divine economy, Irenaeus was able to allow history to be itself, by virtue of its very relation to God. Because all that God does is achieved by means of his two hands, the Son and the Spirit, it is done both effectively and in due recognition of the integrity of created being. Von Balthasar, who sees that in Irenaeus there is a kind of aesthetic of the divine economy — one of the sections of his chapter on this theologian is entitled ‘God’s Temporal Art’ — comments that ‘there is no extraction of a permanent content from lost time as in the Platonists; recapitulation gives time itself validity before eternity’. Putting the matter otherwise, we may say that Irenaeus is able to give a remarkably coherent and satisfying account of the divine constitution of and involvement in the created world’s time and space. Time and space are given their distinctive dynamic of interrelatedness by God’s creating, upholding, redeeming and perfecting activity.
“It is arguable that few later theologies have achieved so adequate an integration of time and eternity, the one and the many, as Irenaeus. His work should not be idealized, for he also bequeathed problems to the tradition, but in general we shall not go far astray if we use him as a measure against which to assess prospective accounts of the economy. In contrast to him, some theologies are in danger of emphasizing creation at the expense of redemption, and the reverse. The typical Western theology, for example, tends to stress salvation to the neglect of creation, and this accounts for the fact that much recent discussion of christology — for example, in connection with the quest of the historical Jesus — abstracts it from its broader context. This is important, because different conceptions of the divine economy bring in their train different ways of understanding God’s relatedness to time and space. Those different emphases in their turn bring varying accounts of what it is to live in the world.”
— from Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
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