Christian Addiction

The Metaphor of Debt-Bondage in Roman Theology

Bibliographic Data

ID8203129
AuthorsLance Mccracken (0000-0002-4099-3882, University of California, Santa Barbara, corresponding author), Lucas McCracken (Humanities and Social Change Center, Department of Religious Studies, University of California , Santa Barbara)
Year2023
Volume91
Issue4
Pages896-919
Publication date2023-12-31
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the American Academy of Religion (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7189 • E-ISSN: 1477-4585
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jaarel/lfae058
OpenAlexW4400604202
LanguageEN
References cited22

What exactly is addiction? Scholars, clinicians, and addicts themselves consistently arrive at a fork in the road in their respective quests for the meaning of addiction: choice or compulsion, crime or disease? Despite these many inquiries, one important aspect of addiction’s past remains unexamined—its deep theological history. Christian theologians writing in Latin from the second to the seventeenth century used the term addiction metaphorically to describe the sinful human condition. In this article, I uncover the genesis and development of the Christian addiction metaphor in the writings of Roman theologians Tertullian, Ambrose, and Augustine. I analyze their theologies of addiction to show how the language and logic of Roman pecuniary jurisprudence structures their thinking about sin, salvation, and free will. To conclude, I suggest that the disease-crime ambivalence constitutive of our contemporary understanding of addiction originated in their oxymoronic definition of sin as both generational enslavement and willful servitude

Addiction · Aesthetics · Debt · Economics · Macroeconomics · Metaphor · Theology · Augustinian Studies and Theology · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Neuroscience · Philosophy · Psychology

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