Paul Fiddes and Hugh Whittaker on love in business

Can business do better at showing love? Is profit-making inherently greedy, or can we subvert structural responsibilities to shareholders in favour of stakeholders? 

Words: Paul S. Fiddes and Hugh Whittaker

Viewers of BBC television news may have been surprised, in the first week of January this year, to see a transmission from the New York Stock Exchange, where the bell was being rung for beginning of trading under a huge banner that proclaimed: “New York Stock Exchange. God’s Love. We deliver”. For the viewer, there was a distinct sense of shock that love and business were being so publicly brought together. Actually, “God’s Love” is the name of an organisation in New York that cooks and home-delivers medically tailored meals for people too sick to shop or cook for themselves. The director of the charity was being honoured by being allowed to ring the bell. But the impression given was that the Stock Exchange itself was delivering God’s Love. Our question is really whether that is an impossible vision.

This would be a quite different view of the of the place of love in business from one that often circulates among Christian people. In popular Christian writing and conferences for Christians in the workplace, the advice is often given to ‘share more about Jesus’ and not give in personally to temptations to moral corruption. Important though these aims are, they have the individual businessperson in mind, while “God’s love – we deliver” in the context of a stock exchange makes the promise (even if unintentionally!) that the radical love that Jesus showed can have an effect on the structures and aims of business and international corporations. Is this really such a shocking idea?

Recently a project has been running at Regent’s Park College in the University of Oxford called ‘Love in Business and the Economy’, which has been tackling these issues. In a series of fourteen seminars available openly online, theologians, business leaders and economists have gathered from different faith-groups – Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu – to think about the difference that Jesus’ double command to love neighbour and love God can make to the whole financial and business world, not just individuals in it. 

We’ve been creating a conversation that we believe is of crucial importance today, when capitalism has been taken over by the aim of maximising profit for shareholders, so that business has been driven by greed and the needs of both society and the natural world have been ignored. The results are clear in widespread poverty, the enriching of a very small class of wealth-owners, the spoiling of our environment, and a climate emergency.

There are many aspects to love, but a great deal of our conversation has centred on just two, which have been marked in the Christian tradition by two Greek words: agape and eros. The first kind, agape, is self-giving love. It thinks of the other person, it wants what is good for the other person, and it is prepared to sacrifice the self for the other. The second kind, eros, is a desire someone has to be fulfilled through another person, or thing. It is marked by self-love and self-interest.

Christian thinkers have fallen into the careless habit of simply approving agape and condemning eros. But that would mean that religious faith and business would inevitably part company. Business in a capitalist economy depends on a certain amount of self-interest or self-love. The desire for profit drives the entrepreneur as well as the established company. Within limits this is a perfectly proper human urge: eros is part of love. Christ himself said that we should love our neighbour as we love ourselves, and if we don’t know how to love ourselves we are not going to be able to love others. 

The problem with the current economy is that the eros-dimension has got totally out of hand, and desire has become greed. Making profit for the shareholders in the company has frequently become the only aim of business. Eros always needs to be balanced with agape, with wanting the good of others. And experience has shown that this will be for the good of the business.

Agape love means a concern for all stakeholders, for sustainability and for social purpose. ‘Stakeholders’ are those who have an interest in the company, and this doesn’t just mean shareholders; it includes the workers, the suppliers, the customers and the whole community in which the business is set. ‘Sustainability’ is about including the natural world among the stakeholders. Love for the planet will give a business a long-term future rather than exhausting the natural resources it is drawing on. Social purpose is about the question: what problem in society, what problem in people’s lives, is this business solving? This requires having a deep understanding of the problems that people actually have, and this means love as sympathy and empathy, being able to think ourselves into other people’s lives.

Paul Polman, until recently the CEO of Unilever, changed the company to take all stakeholders, sustainability and social purpose seriously, declaring in a BBC radio interview that “we work for billions of people, the consumers of our products, not for a few billionaires”. He made the changes on the first day, because he reckoned that they wouldn’t sack him on his first day. The results, he reported, were good in attracting long-term investment, even if there was short-term loss; they were good in creating a company people wanted to work for, and to which they gave real commitment; and they were good in creating good will and trust among suppliers and customers.

God is love, and God is present in the whole universe as a power of love, enabling creation to flourish and come to fulfilment at every level. The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that there are rhythms of love in God, movements of loving relationship that we can only say are like those between a Father and a Son in the energy of the Spirit. In these dynamic relations and flows of love we are called to share. So as we open ourselves to love of others, in the agape of business life, we find that we are caught up into a movement of love and justice that is far greater than us:

There is a love which is inexhaustible when ours is exhausted, and which is always more than we can summon up. 

In the last fifty years, eros-love has got out of proportion in business, in the form of maximising profit. But it is still a valid and important dimension of both business and love itself. It gives a warmth and a humanity to agape love. Let’s think of a personal relationship, between two people. If one person really loves the other, then they will want the other to make their own contribution to the relationship. This treats the other with dignity and respect. Those who love are not just giving themselves to the other, but receiving, being fulfilled, being enriched by the other. So it is in acts of love in society: those giving to others must also receive from others, or agape love becomes a cold charity that will not deepen human community. 

So too it is right that agape in business is accompanied by the eros of self-love and self-fulfilment. A benevolent approach, wanting the good of the other, must mean in turn a flourishing of one’s self, just as long as self-interest doesn’t swamp everything else in greed. It is eros that often provides the incentive to begin a business and keep it going. It is the dynamic behind the entrepreneur: it gets them up every morning. Eros opens up diversity in the market place, brings in new actors, new approaches, and breaks the power of monopolies. 

Eros-love is a passion, where agape-love is a virtue. This passion can open us up the passionate flow of love and justice that is there already in the world ahead of us as the desire of God. There can then be a reality in the unwitting slogan of the New York stock exchange: ‘God’s love, we deliver’. 

Revd Prof Paul Fiddes is Professor of Systematic Theology at Oxford University, founder of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture and the Centre for Baptist Studies. 

Prof Hugh Whittaker is Director of the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies and Professor in the Economy and Business of Japan at Oxford University.

This article appeared in Issue 5 of S(h)ibboleth magazine. Buy your copy now!