Why Carl Trueman Wishes He Were Catholic And What It Has To Do With Our Economic Woes

Carl Trueman sounds off with this usual flair on the state of the US economy:

The economy needs a certain amount of credit to promote investment, innovation, to keep the wheels of the economy oiled; but when credit becomes the major engine of the economy -- and it is hard to see how a consumer-driven economy like ours can avoid such a result -- then the overall economy is little more than one vast pyramid scheme driven not by hard work, investment, and innovation but by get rich quick laziness. A bubble built on thin, very thin, air. This kind of situation is fueled not by rational investment strategies but by hedonism, by that old washed-up gambler idea that the next spin of the roulette wheel will bring the big jackpot (and even if it doesn't, hey, it was still fun trying). And credit of the almost unbounded kind we have seen over the last decade or so is the modern economic equivalent of a Tower of Babel -- a means of shaking off limits, of breaking old rules and establishing new ones, of making ourselves into gods. I have often joked in class that I wish I were a Catholic because then I would have a better vocabulary for describing what I do when I buy something on credit: I take nothing and I make it into something; I transubstiate a plastic card and an electronic impulse into a book, a car, a holiday. Buying when I don't have the real power to buy makes me god, a creator and a transubstantiator, and fuels my worship of self, as I stand in awe of my god-like powers. Thus, even now, as the credit markets lie in ruins, we are so blinded by our idolatry (Psalm 115!) that we cannot stop.