God’s Economy: Productivity vs. Personalization

Fruitfulness is impersonal participation in God’s creative order.

One of the most interesting shifts in Western thought happened so gradually that most of us hardly notice it. Somewhere between the early church, the Protestant Reformation, and the Enlightenment, we changed the metric by which we evaluate human activity.

• Originally, the metric was fruit.

• Later, it became salvation status.

• Later still, it became profit.

Understanding that shift clarifies a great deal about our current cultural confusion.

The Biblical Economy

The Bible’s economic imagination begins with agriculture. In the Book of Genesis, humanity is placed in a garden and given two simultaneous commands:

• Be fruitful and multiply

• Tend and steward the garden

Those instructions are not merely biological. They describe humanity’s role in creation.

We are meant to participate in the unfolding productivity of life itself.

The pattern looks something like this:

Creation → Cultivation → Fruitfulness → Abundance

Work, in this sense, is not primarily about money. It is participation in God’s creative order.

This is why Jesus Christ constantly uses agricultural imagery:

• vines and branches

• seeds and soil

• wheat and tares

• fig trees

• harvests

And His test of truth is simple:

“You will know them by their fruits.”

Notice what He does not say.

He does not say:
You will know them by their ideology.

Or by their institutional authority.

Or even by their religious confidence.

The test is what grows from their lives.

The Early Christian Emphasis: Participation in Life

Early Christian thinkers leaned heavily into this idea. The bishop Irenaeus of Lyons summarized the goal of human existence in a single line:

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

Salvation, in this early Christian imagination, was not merely a legal verdict on the soul. It was the restoration of life itself.

Human beings were meant to grow into alignment with the life of God—a concept that later developed into the doctrine known as Theosis.

In this view, salvation is less about passing a spiritual exam and more about participating in the generative life of creation.

When that life flows through people, fruit appears:

• wisdom

• kindness

• creativity

• healing

• truth

• flourishing communities

---

The Reformation Shift: Anxiety About Salvation

Martin Luther and John Calvin were responding to real abuses in the medieval church—particularly the commercialization of salvation.

They emphasized something profoundly important:

Salvation is a gift of grace.

But this corrective also shifted the conversation toward a new central question:

How can the individual know he is saved?

This question generated elaborate debates about predestination, election, and assurance of salvation.

Ironically, this intense concern about salvation helped produce cultures of remarkable discipline and productivity. The sociologist Max Weber famously argued that Protestant anxiety about election helped create the work ethic that fueled early capitalism.

In other words, anxiety about salvation often translated into extraordinary economic fruitfulness.

The Enlightenment Shift: Profit Replaces Fruit

Then another shift occurred.

During the Enlightenment, economics gradually detached itself from theology. Thinkers like Adam Smith reframed economic life in terms of markets, incentives, and profit.

Productivity remained important—but the moral language changed.

Instead of asking:

Is this activity fruitful in the order of creation?

We began asking:

Is this activity profitable?

Sometimes those two answers coincide. Farming, engineering, medicine, and scientific discovery are both fruitful and profitable.

But not always.

Profit can also be generated by extraction rather than creation.

Speculation, rent-seeking, bureaucratic expansion, and prestige industries can accumulate wealth without necessarily expanding the stock of life in the world.

The difference between fruit and profit suddenly becomes very important.

Fruitfulness increases life. Profit (sometimes) merely redistributes it. And at its most egregious, a system focused on profit (vs. Fruitfulness) becomes downright parasitic (of labor, of goodwill, of capacity for fruitfulness) even to the point of eating the seed corn.

And if we’re looking for an all-encompassing phrase to name “fruitlessness”, it just might be “grift.”

Yeast

Aside: How is the Gospel focus on fruitfulness related to the Yeast of The Pharisees? We will try to make the case later, but for now: The Yeast of the Pharisees …

• reinforces a social system that allows people to feel validated despite producing little of value.

• can be interpreted as the social mechanism that allows fruitlessness to masquerade as virtue. (Yeast inflates.It puffs things up. And this is exactly what happens when institutions reward:

  • status over substance

  • signaling over production

  • validation over truth

• Puffed up people believe they are above those nitty gritty tasks so essential to productivity and high performance.

The Fig Tree Test

The Gospels contain a moment that captures this distinction with startling clarity: the cursing of the fig tree.

The tree looks healthy. It has leaves.

But it produces no fruit.

And it is condemned.

The problem is not evil intention. It is sterility.

The tree consumes resources without contributing to the orchard.

It is, in modern terms, a biological grift.

This metaphor becomes even more pointed when applied to religious authority. Jesus directs some of His harshest criticism toward the Pharisees, accusing them of maintaining status and authority while neglecting justice, mercy, and humility.

They had structure, prestige, and confidence.

But they lacked fruit.

Examples make the difference clear.

Fruitful:

• farming

• building infrastructure

• healing

• fixing and maintaining

• fertilizing

• teaching

• scientific discovery

Potentially profitable but not necessarily fruitful:

• speculation

• rent-seeking

• status bureaucracies

• manipulative fundraising

---

Fruitfulness and the Whole Garden

There is one more dimension worth mentioning.

The biblical concept of fruitfulness includes not only human life but the flourishing of creation as a whole. The prophets sometimes describe ecological disorder as the result of human moral disorder. The Book of Hosea, for example, speaks of a land mourning because human injustice has disrupted the harmony of creation.

Fruitfulness, therefore, is not merely quantitative expansion.

A healthy garden is not simply “more plants everywhere.” It is cultivated, balanced, and sustained.

Human fruitfulness must remain aligned with stewardship of the whole garden.

---

God’s Economy

This brings us back to the central theme.

The biblical imagination operates with a different economic metric than the one we typically use today.

God’s economy does not primarily measure profit.

It measures life.

• Does this activity increase the flourishing of creation?

• Does it produce wisdom, beauty, knowledge, healing, and thriving communities?

• Does it expand the orchard?

• Or does it simply redistribute wealth from fruit planted by someone else?

And the test remains exactly what Jesus said it would be:

You will know them by their fruits.