Many are familiar with Catholic and Protestant flavors of Christian social thought, but little is known about Orthodox iterations. Dylan Pahman joins the podcast to talk about his book The Kingdom of God and the Common Good, which aims to fill that gap. In it, he explores both the thought of Orthodox theologians and social thinkers less-known in the West and explains how the rise of Communism delayed the development of social thought in the Orthodox world.

Related Links

The Kingdom of God and the Common Good by Dylan Pahman

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06 ):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, informed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund. Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson. Today with me is Dylan Pahman at the Acton Institute. Dylan has written a tremendous compendium of Orthodox social teaching, especially on economics. It’s titled Kingdom of God and the Common Good. Is it “in the Common Good” or “in Common Good”?

Dylan Pahman (01:07 ):

The Kingdom of God and the Common Good.

James Patterson (01:09 ):

Okay. My PDF has a slightly abridged title up here. So …

Dylan Pahman (01:14 ):

Sequel will be Two Kingdom God, two, common Good, and so on. We’ll drop the the’s at some point and be a new title.

James Patterson (01:21 ):

Please tell me that this is the first time you’ve used that joke. Okay. As some listeners know, when I interview people who are my friends, things tend to be a little bit looser. Dylan and I have known each other for many years and I’m very excited about this project because it is something that I never thought of, but rather than having me explain it, how about we’ll have Dylan. So Dylan, tell us about what inspired you to write this project to maybe give us the elevator pitch for the listeners.

Dylan Pahman (01:54 ):

Yeah, definitely. So I’ve been working here at Acton for 14 years as a research fellow and as an editor of our academic journal. And I got all my degrees are in theology, so all the economics and political theory I’ve learned on the job. And part of that was reading a lot of great scholarship and hearing a lot of great lectures of people talking about Roman Catholic social thought and Calvinist social thought, and even some Lutherans and other people. And I am Greek Orthodox, and I kept thinking, well, “what’s our perspective on all those stuff?” And for those unfamiliar, the term “Christian social thought” refers to the problem of the working poor in the industrial era and then further issues, social and economic issues beyond that. So it begins in the Roman Catholic tradition with the encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII. And that was “On the New Things” is literally what it means or on revolutionary change.

(02:50 ):

So he is looking at the problems of social unrest and the rise of socialism, and he’s trying to come at it from the wealth of, at that point, 1,900 years of Christian tradition while also admitting that the world was very different and trying to engage that. And so that was the, inspiration is I really felt like my tradition needed something like that too. I think there’s a lot we can learn from other traditions and in fact, the first part–the book’s in five parts–the first part is just a survey of here’s what the other Christians are doing. Orthodox tend to like to be special sometimes, and we are special, but we also need to be part of the broader conversation. And I really don’t think we’ll know what our unique contribution is until we’ve actually surveyed, well, here’s what the other Christians are doing, here’s what the common ground is, and here’s maybe some areas of dissonance.

(03:38 ):

So the goal is to research and figure out what are orthodox principles for engaging our modern world and our modern economies and questions of wealth and poverty today, all the complexities of wages and lending and monetary policy and all that kind of stuff. And so what I wrote was basically the book I wished existed 14 years ago that didn’t exist. It’s a book that walks readers through contemporary Christian social thought, biblical teaching on wealth, poverty and society, orthodox church history, and then a survey of modern economics, which I actually look at historically. So my goal is that each chapter is very short, 2,000 to 3,000 words, like Law & Liberty essay length and people can maybe read one a day, that sort of thing and work their way through the book. And instead of bombarding people with terms, I take this more historical approach where I tell the story of Orthodox social thought and I tell the story of modern economics.

(04:35 ):

So we get a sense of who were the people; who was Adam Smith; who were the classical political economists; what were they dealing with; what motivated the rise of socialism and Marxism and what was the difference with Christian socialism and social activism and that kind of stuff. And then I finally take readers to contemporary Orthodox contributions, which there have been some, but part of the problem is that history that with the Russian revolution, you have atheistic, militaristic communism, just sweep across Eastern Europe and Russia and other traditionally Orthodox land had for a long time been under the Ottoman Empire and you just don’t really have a space for Orthodox to think freely about this stuff. The thinkers who did escape, and many of them were exiled from Russia, suddenly they find themselves with a very different set of questions that they concern themselves with. So they are wondering, well, how do we be faithful to our Eastern Orthodox tradition while living in the West?

(05:31 ):

And they start focusing on questions of ecumenism. And those are very good things, but it’s very distant from that question of, well, how do I be a good Orthodox Christian banker or whatever? How do I live in our modern economy as a faithful orthodox Christian? So that’s the goal of the book, is to walk people through that so that they know the story, they know our tradition and they know something of how modern economies work to prevent the kind of unfortunate and sometimes embarrassing statements that you can find on blogs and unfortunately sometimes even in unofficial church documents about the nature of wealth and poverty in our economies today.

James Patterson (06:10 ):

So I was actually about to ask you about the intervention of Soviet communism because I know a lot of listeners, their probably biggest association with Orthodoxy is going to be Russian Orthodoxy. So what happened with the encounter, not just of Russian Orthodoxy, but of Eastern Orthodox in general with communism? How did they respond to it in their social thought?

Dylan Pahman (06:42 ):

Yeah, so you can find writings actually as early as Vladimir Solovyov, who is a nineteenth century Russian Orthodox philosopher. He died i