The Relationship of God's Providence to Market Economies and Economic Theory

In this article, we examine the doctrine of providence to see if the market system used by the United States and many other industrial nations can be thought of as part of God's providential care. The doctrine of providence concerns the preservation and direction of the universe. Theologians discussing providence sometimes refer to examples from the natural sciences but not from the social sciences. However, economists since Adam Smith have used the idea of spontaneous order to describe the orderly function of market systems even when no human agency is directly responsible for its operation. We suggest that this can be thought of as a part of God's providential care of humanity. We discuss the ideas of Smith and Friedrich Hayek relating to spontaneous order and then examine how the market system works. We focus on the impersonal and anonymous nature of many economic interactions today and how this differs from the more-personal relationships that characterized the economy of ancient Israel. The model of perfect competition can be thought of as a tool to analyze the workings of the economic system when no, one person has any conscious power over the plans of any other person. We conclude by examining whether Christians can argue for the market system when it is based on a notion of self-interest rather than on altruism