LAUSR

Contemporary sacramental theology construes the sacraments as a symbolic gift exchange between God and humanity; God initiates in the ministry of Jesus Christ, and human beings acknowledge and respond to God’s gift. The gratuity of that initial gift is ensured not only by reference to God’s all-sufficient nature, but also in many cases by excising economic value and economic exchange from the symbolic realm within which the sacramental gift exchange proceeds. This poses an intellectual and a practical problem. Intellectually, economic exchange is fundamentally symbolic and even ritualistic, so that the division between them is difficult to define and maintain. Practically, economic behavior is morally relevant, and the sacraments ought to give some purchase on marketplace behavior. In this essay, anthropological and economic work on “consumption rituals,” based on the work of Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, is brought to bear on defining the relationship between sacraments and economic exchange and articulating the sociological preconditions for experiencing market exchange as an extension of sacramental gift exchange.