Usury,Debt,and the Ethics of Mutuality: Toward a Theological Reordering of Economic Life

Abstract

This article examines the ambivalence of debt as a simultaneously moral and economic category. It argues that debt traverses two axes: existential and economic indebtedness, and debt as either mutuality or domination. Drawing on biblical prohibitions of usury, Jubilee legislation, medieval scholastic debates, and modern social contract theory, the article contends that the moral problem is not debt per se but its severance from covenantal relations of shared risk, trust, and limit. In premodern traditions, economic exchange was subordinated to prior moral and political bonds; by contrast, financialised capitalism abstracts debt from these relations, treating it as a neutral instrument of contract between autonomous individuals. The result is a governance regime in which indebtedness concentrates power and erodes democratic agency. Recovering a theological grammar of mutuality enables a distinction between restorative and extractive debt, and offers resources for re-embedding economic life within just and participatory forms of common life.