(I have edited this post realising my most of the content was pre-mature, and please forgive any consternation this causes. And apologies where the comments do not align with this truncated version)
Within my PhD work I have ben trying to understand how capitalist markets affect Christian identity formation. Within the work of Bernd Wannenwetsch, William Cavanaugh, Reinhard Hütter, Daniel Bell, Vincent Miller, Stephen Long etc, I have come to three understandings about how late capitalist markets function:
1) The market is a form of “ascetic” practice, disciplining our bodies and inducting us with habits and practices in contrast with ecclesial practices.
2) The market then sets up patters of desire through these ascetic practices in contrast to the church in its ecclesial forms and worship and orients us around desire.
3) That comes together in embodiment and social relationship, and individually around desire, of how the market makes a false form of universal communion.
Cavanaugh, Miller, Wannenwetsch et al, have set up an inherently conflictual and rival relationship between the church and the market. Within these accounts the problem is they present an over dichotomized account.
What ways might we respond to this? One way I would suggest is a more nuanced reading, and Augustinian reading of the condition of modernity as a saeculum.
A large question I am asking is if an Augustinian reformed account of a missional ecclesiology in relation to capitalism can be made.