“Urban Dilemma” by Diane G. Casey

Getting a grip on what money is and on the place of money in our lives is intellectually, ethically, and spiritually difficult. Of course, we can be tempted to overstate this difficulty and thereby to miss a rather obvious fact: money is particularly confusingfor people with money. People without money do not, generally, find themselves caught up in theoretical or moral quandaries about what they ought to do with money. It is those of us with money—more money, perhaps, than we need—who face difficult questions. Here, I want to talk about one instance of a money problem, what I call the impact investor’s dilemma.

The impact investor’s dilemma is the conundrum that capital-providing institutions face when they try to act on values or convictions that the market economy does not typically register. The difficulty or dilemma arises when such institutions try to measure the social, missional, communal, or moral good or benefit that a loan, investment, or grant may have or yield and to then use that measurement to help guide future financial activity. Employing standard financial metrics is crucial to the way most financial institutions operate because those metrics allow for comparison between potential investments that may be otherwise incommensurable or incomparable, but there is no standardized mode for measuring impact or social returns—impact may resist being measured in the way we believe (rightly or wrongly) that things like credit risk or potential future cash flows can be measured. It is, moreover, not obvious how ordinary financial metrics and criteria for lending or investing can be related to impact criteria or metrics.    

Although it may seem counterintuitive, I suggest we need to flip things around: the impact that needs to be measured should not be, at least not exclusively, external to the money-provider but internal. This may seem like I am proposing that impact investors and lenders simply continue to do what ordinary financial institutions already do. After all, don’t banks and investment firms decide where their money will go based solely on their expectations regarding how that investment will impact them, how this or that allocation of capital will impact their own business? Yes, of course. It is also true that most financial institutions that wrestle with the impact investor’s dilemma attempt to distinguish themselves from other, business-as-usual, companies or funds by including more than their ownbottom line in their analyses and decision-making. It might seem, then, that my briefly stated solution to this dilemma is simply to act more like the normal finance companies to which impact-minded organizations are consciously trying to provide an alternative.

Nevertheless, I am doubling down on my proposal and arguing that this approach ought to be especially compelling for organizations that try to have their granting, lending, or investing activities shaped by Christian convictions and practices. To show why, despite the apparent contradictions, Christians should direct their attention inward rather than outward when considering the impact of their money, I first need to lay out some theological considerations.

Theology and the Truth About Money and Ourselves

What is money for? What should we do with money? Being able to answer these questions requires that we be able to speak truly about who we are and about what money is. [1]

For Christians, the ultimate criterion by which speech about ourselves, money, or any other thing is to be judged is a particular human life that culminated in crucifixion. In the cross, we see a pitiful victim crushed by the fears and ambitions of other humans, and we see God’s resolute, unshakeable love for what God has created, even when there is nothing lovable about it at all. So when we wonder what it is that is most true about who we are, we look to the life of Jesus. The resurrection is God’s affirmation that this moment, at the pinnacle of the story of the man Jesus, is the absolute turning point of the story of creation and is therefore the touchstone of truth. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus paradigmatically reveal the active and creative love of God. The truth about creatures—about ourselves—is therefore also supremely revealed in Jesus.

In the cross, therefore, we see ourselves and our world stripped of all the illusions we like to revel in, the fantasies that seduce us into acting as if we were not so radically dependent as we know ourselves, deep down, to be. The cross reflects back to us our own essential poverty—we have nothing that is absolutely our own to bring to the table. We are (have being) and are what we are (the particular beings) because of what has been freely given to us. In the original creation of everything out of nothing and in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the same active love is at work, the same love that brings into being that which can respond to God’s love. For Christians, the nature of truth—not a truth about this or that thing or state of affairs in the world—is to be found in Jesus because it is in looking at this human life that we are best positioned to reflect and respond appropriately and truly to God’s active and creative love. We are therefore most apt to speak truly when we are least tempted to see ourselves (or something within creation) as deserving or calling forth a responsive action from God.

Letting the cross remind us of how God (re-)creates everything from nothing should also remind us to value the positions of those who have been forced into positions of stark receptivity and beggarliness. By looking at what gets squeezed out or reckoned too unmanageable for our current modes of life, we can begin to get a truer sense of the systems and institutions that give our lives order. By grace and imagination, we may begin to see them from the outside. By seeing that the norms, practices, and rules that give meaning, security, and order to most of our lives are in one way or another based on exclusion or limitation, we might be able to see that these contingent arrangements are part of creation and not the Creator.[2]

We both speak about and with money. Money talks, as the saying goes. We express things by the many and varied ways we use money. Truthful speech with and about money is speech that is put under the judgment of the Creator as revealed in Jesus. Accepting this judgment of our monetary speech, as a condition for its truthfulness, may require that we look to those who are presumed to have nothing to say about and, importantly, with money. That is to say, trying to answer the questions “what is money for?” and “what should we do with money?” might involve looking to those who seem to have been denied a voice in the monetary conversation. By extending the conversation of money to those who are at the table but presumed to have nothing to contribute, we may rediscover the blessedness of being receivers, for that is the truth about what we really are.

Returning to the Dilemma

Now we can return to the impact investor’s dilemma.

When the sorts of impact-interested institutions I discussed above try to measure extra-monetary impact, they often struggle to link the external good or impact they are hoping their capital will yield with the internal impact that their financial operations will return to them. An impact-investing firm may manage to develop a framework or theory to measure the extra-monetary impact of their investments, but what they receive will almost always be measured in terms of money. At best, then, such firms will have to settle for talking about the extra-monetary benefits they gain or receive in extremely vague and abstract terms. They might, perhaps, tell themselves that impact investing is just the right thing to do. Or they may believe wholeheartedly that some social arrangement is more just than another, and they want their financial practices to help establish this preferable social reality. But it is not at all clear that they have anything to receive from the manifestation of a more just or equitable society. This is why the measurement of impact is always outwardly focused. It is, from this perspective, people and groups outside that have needs or something to gain. The impact-investing firm, already having money to give, is thus in the position of a benevolent distributor.  This abstract moral obligation to give out of excess to those in need is a kind of noblesse oblige. The lenders or “nobles” have a duty, perhaps, but they have themselves nothing to gain. Thus, they cannot be gift-receivers, which is what, under the judgment of the cross, we are revealed to be: creatures whose being is wholly dependent, at every moment, upon the active love of the Creator.   

The creature who has no needs and nothing to gain is not so obviously a “creature” at all. Our theological discussion of God’s purely active agency (rather than a responsive or receptive agency) should alert us that thinking about the ethics of financial dealing strictly in terms of duty (where one has nothing to receive but only to do) tempts us to forget that it is God who is the Creator, and we who are God’s creatures. Perhaps despite their good intentions, then, impact-interested firms that fail to recognize that their good lies in becoming receivers of gifts have confused themselves with the Creator. At the very least, their vision will be distorted and their ability to speak truly about themselves and about money will be compromised.

The impact investor’s dilemma arises because firms have not managed to make the hardest shift of all, the one that runs counter to the entire spirit of our socioeconomic arrangement. They continue, despite their honorable aims, to act and think about themselves as having everything to give and nothing specific to gratefully, even desperately, receive. They have not managed to recognize that vulnerability and dependence may be ideals rather than horrors to be avoided at all costs. But Christians ought to push further. After all, we are told that we should approach God, the source of our lives, like a child, helpless and bringing nothing to exchange or barter. This is not an insult to creatures—it is a condition for truthful, creaturely speech and action.

So my suggestion is this: Christian organizations that give or lend money may avoid the impact investor’s dilemma by radically shifting their posture toward the recipients of their granted or lent money. To be as clear as possible, the radical difference is that such a Christian organization does not give out of abundance because it’s the right thing to do; they give or lend or invest because they recognize that they are, at their essence, dependent creatures whose participation in the triune life of God is a matter of pure gift and that they are therefore essentially gift receivers, needy and dependent. The charitable or missional giving of Christians is not simply the overflow of blessing that tumbles down from those who have only to give and nothing to receive. It is, rather, a humble outreaching, a begging. For those who need the funds an impact-interested organization possesses are, as Jesus told us, blessed.

The way around the impact investor’s dilemma is to recognize that we are most vulnerable and needy in those areas of human life in which we believe we need nothing. This is the reality of the granter, lender, or investor. In the instances, where we are apt to take ourselves to be self-sufficient, we are in desperate need of gifts that can bring us into the light to see and to tell the truth about ourselves. Once we acknowledge this reality, we do not need to measure anything external. The impact is on us. What have we learned about money by giving to those who have none or who need it to do the work of God among the poor and the destitute? What have we learned about the nature of our Creator and Savior by giving our money? What have we learned about a cultural and political economy that persuades us to ignore those who have been shouldered out of the systems and institutions that we take for granted and which make life orderly and provide us security and stability?

Once we make this shift, we may find that a quantitative theory for measuring extra-monetary impact is not something we really want at all because there is nothing strictly externalto measure. The impact to be measured may, from this view, be more like a revelation. We do not measure a revelation; we reflect and recognize that we are now, through no power or resources of our own, able to tell new, richer, deeper, more truthful stories about ourselves and the Creator of everything.

Again, turning our reflective gaze back upon ourselves may seem counterintuitive. Isn’t such an approach contrary to the spirit of the kind of granting, investing, or lending that we’ve been discussing? Isn’t an other-focused or at least other-conscious approach exactly what separates this way of dealing with money from business-as-usual capital provision? These are reasonable questions.

Businesses and grant-making institutions are indeed constrained and shaped by market forces. We are likely all familiar with the way such forces discipline organizations of all kinds into prioritizing efficiency and monetizable returns, even if we may feel strongly about things like justice, fairness, equality, or the common good. It is therefore understandable that we tend to think about an outward-looking perspective as the thing that distinguishes impact-interested financial institutions from other financial institutions. It is precisely a desire to be less self-focused that separates impact investing or other similar institutions from business-as-usual finance. Aren’t we regressing, then, by inverting our analytical gaze and turning our attention back upon ourselves? This would be true if we were to accept the picture of a self and of self-interests that business-as-usual financial institutions presume. But, in fact, we have good reasons to reject this picture.

Reading Self-interest and Impact through the Doctrine of Creation

The market economy operates under the presupposition that individuals enter into a commodity-exchange network fully formed as individuals, as selves. The communal or social dimension of markets are, according to this vision, reducible to the efficiency that such sociality provides. What is shared, social, or common emerges spontaneously out of market activity as a sort of apparatus that serves to meet the different needs of individuals by coordinating them. So according to our normal way of talking about and acting in the economy, an exchange takes place or a market itself emerges because individual humans discover that their personal desires can be met most efficiently by engaging with one another. The individual brings their “self-interest” into relation with others by means of market exchange and exits the market as the exact same individual with the exact same complex of desires or interests (only now, perhaps, more satisfied). Thus, this very common way of thinking about and behaving in our market economy supposes that the individual is logically and historically prior to the social.

In the view sketched above, having a self is not so complicated a thing at all. We know ourselves and our desires transparently, and we connect with other selves to meet the individual needs or wants of which we, apparently, have total cognizance. What we do not do, according to this perspective, is learn or receive our selves. We do not gain new desires or greater clarity about what we really want or what our real interests are­­ from our relating to others. But if, as Paul tells us, “[we] are not [our] own,” this simple picture of straightforward and absolute self-ownership and self-knowledge might not suffice (1 Cor. 16:19 NRSV) The Christian doctrine of creation does not sit comfortably with any picture of selfhood, individuality, or self-interest that does not acknowledge the self to be, essentially, gift. The traditional ways in which the church has talked about being created or being a creature suggest that our selfhood is something that can only be thankfully received and that becoming the self that we are is the process of continuing to open ourselves up to the Giver, of becoming more perfect receivers.

Now, if our selves are not personal, private possessions that we own or have unique access to, then centering our efforts to track or anticipate the impact of our monetary provision around the self is not egotistical or business as usual. As we come to acknowledge that whatever selfhood we have is received, we may find that that taking inventory of the gifts we have received is not nearly so self-centered as it may at first appear. If we, therefore, measure the impact of our financial activity by way of self-reflection, we are not neglecting others but consciously undertaking that never-ending process of learning our dependence and the limitedness of our self-knowledge, which are all bound up with growing into the reality that we are creatures and not the Creator.  

Buried in the noble intentions of many impact-interested investors is the belief that the only gifts to be received and the only needs to be met are for those outside. The surreptitious presumption here is that the money-havers, money-providers, and impact-measurers are not impacted and receive no gifts by giving or lending or investing. If this is the case, we will proceed financially in a spirit contrary to what the faith tells us about being a creature. To be a creature is to be fundamentally a gift-receiver, and until we find new ways to embed our financial activities within this story, our ways with money will be at odds with the deepest desires of our hearts, desires that make us reach out openhandedly to the Source of all that is for all that we are and possess. If our efforts to re-embed our financial activities within our life of worship and prayer do not help us become better receivers of gifts, we should not expect those activities to bear witness to the Giver of all good gifts.

Measuring impact viaself-reflection is bound to be difficult. It is much easier to measure year-over-year growth when all things are leveled out by a common measure (e.g., money). It is likely inefficient to ask what we have learned about ourselves, what new stories we can tell about God’s love, what new songs we can sing, or what new prayers we can pray. However, we must recall that an efficient formula or theory is just a lens for reading reality. Microscopes are helpful, but they tell a limited story. In fact, their helpfulness is entirely bound up with this limit. Microscopes are helpful insofar as they are embedded in a particular, practical activity, which is itself intelligible as one activity within a human form of life. No amount of peering into a microscope will tell me what novel I should read next or when I ought to use a microscope. Likewise, we can be tempted to think that relatively simple or efficient standards of measurement make things easier than they really do. We therefore ought to pause and reflect on how we rank efficiency in our hierarchy of values.

The Christian vision of creation ought to help us be mindful of the fact that we have no right to expect reality to be simple or to submit to an expedient, formulaic description. In fact, there may be good reason to suspect that any framework for reading reality that does not allow for difficulty is really a lens which distorts our vision, making us think we are seeing things from the view of the Creator rather than a creature. The problem, then, of finding a practical means of measuring impact is not really a technical shortcoming to be solved or overcome. Rather, wrestling with this problem is internal to the sort of financial dealing I have been suggesting. A technical solution will not meet our real needs precisely because it is our own relation to the outcomes of our giving that we are struggling to come to grips with.

The fact that the impact investor’s dilemma seems so stubborn and persistent and that it is a dilemma at all should tell us something. If we find that a hammer just refuses to function well as a tool for producing paintings, perhaps the thing to do is to step back and reconsider whether we have a clear grasp of the activity we are engaged in. Maybe we are confused about what paintingis? Likewise, if the sorts of objective, efficient, and quantitative measures we use to interpret certain bits of our reality (say, patterns of precipitation or the movement of tectonic plates) just seem to refuse to capture the impact of our investments or grants, perhaps we ought to take that as an opportunity to reflect on our understanding of the activity in which we think we are participating. Whydo we expect such impacts to fit neatly within these measures (measures, by the way, developed by humans to describe things external to human persons)? Do we have good reasons for expecting this to be the case? Is it possible that we simply want the effects of our financial dealings to fit themselves to the standards of measure we find most convenient? If so, our frustration gives us an opportunity to reflect on broader desires that we might otherwise leave unexplored.

We may need a healthier imagination than we currently possess to see the truth about what money is and how we are and ought to be dealing with it. For Christians, telling the truth about what we are doing with money should require—at some point—reference to the dramatic narrative Christians tell about a God who creates the world out of nothing but the love that God is, a creative self-giving shared unconditionally between the persons of the Trinity, which takes on the form of a human being in order to reveal the truth about God and the creation and to bring what God has made into the exchange of divine love between Father, Son, and Spirit.  

In this process of self-learning, we may eventually discover that there are dimensions of our impact that we accept as adequately represented by objective or quantifiable values, but we must be sure that these values are identified after we have undergone a process of maturation and growth in self-knowledge because that is an impact of our financial practices. It is this impact, the growth of our selves into the selves we were created to be, that must be registered. We grow into who we are by opening ourselves to judgment, by receiving as gifts the perspectives (on ourselves) of those we are likely to assume have nothing to give or offer to us. Hence, telling the truth about myself and knowing myself (and the impact investing firm’s telling and knowing itself) is a function of my openness to having my own self-story, my own self-intelligibility, linked up to and made dependent upon the gift of other selves and their stories. If we want something to measure in this internal mode of impact measurement, perhaps we should start with this: who, what others, do I now (after, say, the investing or granting) find that I need to reference in order to understand and tell the truth about my own self-interest? What concrete relations of dependence have I recognized or found means of expressing and acknowledging?

In the kingdom of God, there are no pure givers and no pure receivers. Without orienting our efforts to steward the financial resources we have around our own need to discover and receive the gifts the economically needy have to offer us, we will not be able to bear witness to God and to the kingdom that has Christ proclaimed as having “drawn near.” If the church is called to be an anticipation of the kingdom to come, we will need to do more than give out of our excess to help those who have less or those who need our monetary resources in one way or another. In our money-providing, we will need to recall, represent, and continue to learn the ways in which we, too, stand in the presence of our God in our neediness, dependence, and vulnerability. And we do this in hope, yearning for the day when no one will need resources that others have in overabundance, for the day when those who are tempted by their social location to think they have only to give and nothing to receive will no longer need to learn the “law of the Lord” from their fellow citizens (Jer. 31:34).[3]  

[1] It is important that we acknowledge that there is no single, obvious, unchallengeable answer to the overarching question “what is money?” For studies of money and its nature, see Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money (Polity Press, 2004); Stefan Eich, The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes (Princeton University Press, 2022); and Robert Skidelsky, Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics (Yale University Press, 2018).

[2] Rowan Williams provides powerful and lucid reflections on these themes in Williams, Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement (Wm B. Eerdmans, 2000), 49–72.

[3] For an elaboration on these themes, see Williams, “No One Can Be Forgotten in God’s Kingdom,” speech given at the TEAM Conference, Boksburg, South Africa, March 9, 2007, http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1436/no-one-can-be-forgotten-in-gods-kingdom-team-conference-south-africa.html.