Money

Money matters. It seems that money, like sex, is at the core of everything that we human beings do. The life-giving power of money in modern society is godlike. Easy it is for the moral scold to declaim that it should not be so. But the simple fact is, like it or not, that money has nearly omnipotent control over the human race. Its powers range over life and death and everything in between. In its hand is authority to bestow food, shelter and facilities that are basic to lives of human dignity. In abundance money gives us an almost royal freedom to do whatever we please—to travel, to enjoy fine things, to educate our children, to grow old in good health and security. And an excess of money quite literally gives us the power of life and death over others. Even our paltry pocket money placed monthly in the right envelope can literally save people from hunger, disease and worse. Money matters so very much because if we have it, we live and if we have a lot of it, we flourish, we ascend to Olympian heights of freedom and power, and we (and perhaps others too) live long and prosper. But without money, we perish, or if we have only a precious little of it, we (as much of the earth does) wallow in a squalor of mere subsistence. It does seem that money—mammon—rules the earth.

Money is, therefore, also a matter for the religions. It is a kind of challenger to their position in the world. Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson, two men as different from each other in their economic beliefs as they could be, had in common a deep skepticism toward religion. They were skeptical because they observed how religions often distract people from the present material conditions of life. The spiritual strategy of religions, they believed, was to evade our ancient enemy—poverty—rather than bravely to face and slay it in honest and mortal combat.

Indeed, throughout the groaning world today no matter is more urgent to the religions than the matter of what to do about money. The great powers of poverty, sickness, illiteracy, AIDS, malnutrition and starvation rage on a global scale as never before. In the pitiful, blank faces of sallow-cheeked children (who enter our homes routinely on cable television), we truly see the dark angel of death. And his darkness soars on wings made of otherworldly spiritualism; the want of money makes him strong. Money, it seems, is our only hope, the only power on earth that can fell him. Yet according to Jesus, “You cannot serve both God and Money” (Matthew 6:24). What can this mean? In what way ought money matter to the Christian? In what way ought it not to matter?

Money Matters in Christian History

In its history Christianity, unlike a good many of the world’s faiths, never was purely spiritual in its vision. That is mainly because Christianity erected its entire worldview upon a strong doctrine of creation. As the first article of the Apostles’ Creed implies, to the Christian the material world is something much greater than a mere physical presence or a transitory stage on which more deeply spiritual stories will play out. The material world is God’s creation, and it is thus good. The material world is not indifferent, illusory or evil, as it is in many religious visions (consider the great faiths of Hinduism and Buddhism). It is itself something real, essential, good and, we dare say, even sacred.

In the Christian tradition material wealth is directly associated with God’s good creation and thus with God’s will and vision for human beings on earth. Upon opening the Old and New Testaments, we see in a very short time that this is so. There is something about material wealth and poverty in almost every section of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. In the Bible it matters that we are rich or poor. The whole story connects money with the story of God and God’s people. It is not too strong to say that money (or at least material life) is at the root of all that God is said to have done in history, and it is at the root of all that counts as good or evil among the people of God. No subject was addressed by Christ more often than this one, and there really is no Christian doctrine we can think about very long before we come up against questions about economic life—especially if we are relatively rich in the context of a world that is generally poor. To the Christian, then, money not only matters in a transitory way; it is somehow connected with the redemption and eternal destinies of human beings.

Christians realized from the beginning that the matter of wealth was a matter of great theological and spiritual urgency (Gonzalez, pp. x-xvi). Early Christian thinkers all knew that spiritualism or dualism would not do. From sacred tradition, especially the prophets and Jesus, they knew that how we live as economic persons reveals, even exposes, who we are as spiritual persons. The economic life, they reasoned, is a kind of incarnation of the spiritual life. It is a sequence of actions that speak our hearts more loudly than pious words can do. To the extent that our works cannot be disjoined from faith, the ancients rightly judged that the matter of money (or wealth generally) was a matter that had the mark of eternity about it.

As there are now, there were arguments, debates, disagreements and plain old muddles over the problem. Should we have personal possessions at all? If yes (as most agreed we must), then in what quantity and form? How much was too much or too little? The answers of the early Christians tended toward the ascetic (Gonzalez, pp. 71-214). Most looked upon an excess of wealth as spiritually dangerous and morally evil. Throughout the Middle Ages to the Protestant Reformation, the most brilliant thinkers were disposed to denigrate the pursuit of material prosperity. Their model was mainly Jesus, whom they interpreted to have lived a life of poverty and to have enjoined such a life upon his followers.

There is a tendency in today’s consumer society for certain Christians to lionize these historic figures as models of spirituality. But before romanticism sets in, we ought to keep in mind that the moral contest of gaining and having money in their day was very different from that of our own time. Not always but generally in ancient times, it was the rule that one person’s gain was another person’s loss. Only a very small and powerful elite had material wealth in excess, while the vast majority lived in conditions that we would find beneath the dignity of any human being. To such a world—the world of Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin—Jesus’ words about mammon were unambiguous. It was difficult to go out and acquire great fortune without doing things that amounted morally to theft from weaker brothers and sisters. But even as great men spoke old words to an old time, a new economic world was being born. It would require new words.

Like its thinking about science, philosophy, music, art and much else, Christian thinking about economic life stood well until the modern revolutions struck. Then it seemed that nothing stood very well anymore. In the centuries before, life seemed an unbroken, nearly changeless and endless rule by monarchs and a condition of poverty for the vast majority (who as the poor, it was just presumed, would always be with us). The centuries after brought one destabilizing shock after another to the older order. The social order that had stood for more than a thousand years fell like some great old tree. A new world grew up in its place at such dazzling speed that we have not caught up with it yet. All the systems of civilization were reordered, and this was made possible in large measure by the astonishing success of the new economic system that had emerged.

For the first time in human history a people began seriously to think that poverty (just as tyranny) might be erased from the face of the earth (Lay Commission, pp. 10-17). In a new land, under a new political and intellectual order, a new people began to flourish in a new way. Ordinary men and women became wealthy as only nobility had done in ages gone. But they had not attained their good fortunes through the genetic line of heredity, nor had they gained by exploiting weaker folk. They had attained it through the honest labor of their hands, even by providing needed services to others in a cycle of prosperity. Their gain had, in effect, been gain for their fellows. In a remarkably brief span of time, this new middle class of people became the majority of the population. The poor became a minority, yet even they had hope of one day being set free from poverty. They knew that we cannot serve both God and mammon, but it seemed that God had served them with it and that he had called them to serve him in prosperity. New words were needed for this new time, and they are needed still.

Money Matters to the Christian Today

Today debates rage among Christians over money and the material goods of this world. What should be done with the great fortune we have amassed? How should we live? What would God have us think and do? The trouble is that we are at sail in a sea of delights while most of the world and some of us at home are intolerably poor. Socialism was the hue and cry of some, but its glory has faded. Defenders of the free market—capitalism—have won the war of ideas, or so it seems. But that does not solve the spiritual problem of economic identity. How ought we to live our economic lives in such a world? When does our respect for money become worship of the god mammon? How much may we freely enjoy? How much ought we in justice to give? For most, the various questions boil down to one: how are we to view the realm of the superfluous, that which exceeds the mere “necessaries of life,” as Charles Wesley called them?

Some rail against the having and enjoying of superfluous wealth while others in the world hunger and thirst. In their view any countenance of the superfluous is immoral. Our lives and national systems must be rebuilt upon the principle of meeting only our real needs and then the needs of others (Sider). Their appeal is primarily to the biblical prophets and Jesus who, they say, stood against the rich and for the poor.

Others disagree. They argue that the economics of necessity spell global depression of our consumption-driven systems. The outcome would hardly be liberation of the poor from poverty, but instead poverty for almost everyone. They also point to many passages of Scripture that give God’s blessing on the enjoyment of extravagant and superfluous things (Griffiths). What are we to think and do about money, about the superfluous?

The Two Voices of Scripture on Money

We are forced by the nature of the debate to return to our first principles. We must go to Scripture and seek to hear the Word of God in a new way. But when we turn to the Bible for help, we are soon daunted by discovering (if we do not know it already) that the text seems to speak with two voices that are, distressingly, in conflict. The one voice says that to be rich is to have received a blessing from God. It says that material riches are a means by which God expresses redemptive love for his people and makes them flourish. Material riches bring to pass the very vision of delight that our good God had for us.

The other voice is dark with warnings about money. It says that money is a curse, that the rich are accursed, that riches are the wages of sin and unrighteousness, especially toward the poor, with whom God takes his stand against the rich. Many would say that this second voice is essentially the voice of Jesus and that it does not speak good news to those who have more than enough money. Can we hear the two voices of Scripture as one harmonious word from God? Or are we doomed forever to a dialect of dissonance and paradox? The harmony is difficult to hear, but with care it can be done.

Delight and Compassion Embrace

If we listen to the deepest levels of each voice—the one that blesses and the other that curses the rich—we learn that delight and compassion are not alien to each other. Since the one entails the other, in their truest shapes they embrace. Of course, they may become alien to each other—there is a delight that turns hard, into self-indulgent and unjust hedonism, and there is a compassion that turns cold, into righteous, pitiless and joyless moralism. But they need not do so. Indeed, in Scripture, we never really have delight in its truest and fullest sense without compassion, nor do we have compassionate justice, shalom in the truest and fullest sense, without delight.

Let us briefly consider four representative biblical narratives: the creation, the exodus, the exile and the ministry of Christ. For in these narratives, God has given us the elemental structures of a worldview.

In its lyrical, almost liturgical way, Genesis 1 (and Genesis 2-3) pictures God’s making a material world that is, as we said before, good and even sacred. Here the spiritual and physical worlds are as one. More so, God breathed into the lump of earth that was to become a human being. Human beings are pictured as spiritually endowed physical beings that God designed to inhabit a physical world. And it was “good,” as God wished it to be. Even more so, the physical realm is characterized as a pleasure garden that humans are to till and keep as well as enjoy, except that they must not touch the wicked fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. So the most basic vision of human existence as God intended it to be is one of luxurious delight in physicality within a world of moral limits and obligations. This goes to the core of life itself as the ancient Hebrews thought of it (Schneider, pp. 43-64).

The story of the exodus carries on the same double-tinged theme. God rescues the Hebrew people from physical bondage in Egypt and consummates their liberation by giving them a land flowing with milk and honey. It is God, not themselves, who makes them rich and powerful in the land. Because they represent God, they must be especially concerned with those in their midst who have no wealth or power—with the widow, the orphan, the sojourner, the poor. As the people of this God, they must also empower the powerless, enrich those without riches. In their delight they must seek justice, wherein justice means not allowing that any fellow Israelite be poor. Theirs must be a land shining on a hill to the nations, where delight and compassion embrace in a sacred and plainly political way. The whole of the law thus weds delight with compassion, compassion with delight (Limburg, pp. 25-38).

The same double-edged theme shapes the narrative of the exile. The reason God sends his people back into captivity is that the ruling rich have gorged themselves without grieving for the poor. They are not God’s people in the most profound spiritual sense of that concept. The exodus is thus reversed physically, just as it had already been turned back spiritually. The prophets thunder, not against the sacred delight that God blessed, but against the dark hedonism that God warned about in the first place. We cannot elaborate how these themes unfold throughout the so-called wisdom literature—Job, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, even the Song of Songs—but indeed they do (Van Leeuwen, pp. 36-39).

If there is a place in biblical history where we might think delight is sacrificed on the altar of compassion, it would be in the story of Jesus—the story that ends at Golgotha. But delight in the physicality of the world does not die in the heart of Jesus; in him it is reborn and set free again on its way to true shalom for this earth. It is true that in his vision of it we hunger and thirst for the day, for it is not yet. But if we inspect things a little more closely, it is here, as it was already in him.

Moral theology has awakened us in earnest to the “radical Jesus,” the Jesus who, in stark contrast to the Sunday-school cliché, stood like a stern prophet against the powers of his time. He did not fear them. Without reserve Jesus used his tongue like a whip against those who were rich, and indeed he blessed the poor, who would inherit the earth (Wolterstorff, p. 73). Many have drawn from this that Jesus was himself literally poor and that material poverty went with his life of self-denial and suffering (Sider, p. 61). But this image of Jesus simplifies things too much.

Today’s moral theologians have written precious little about another Jesus whose identity emerges in the Gospels. They neglect the “Christ of delight,” who bewildered his religious peers by eating and drinking, rather than fasting. He was the suffering servant, but since he came eating and drinking, pious ones who knew better labeled him a drunkard and a glutton. They, like Judas, could not fathom the freedom he had for wasteful celebration. When he, at his good pleasure, permitted the woman of ill repute to pour the jar of pure nard over his head, that was worth a year’s income at a good job and could have been sold and given to the poor. Jesus broke the seal of the vessel that bottled up the forces of darkness that would betray and crucify him.

Christian economic life should flow naturally from a Christian identity that is, if possible, at one, in perfect harmony, with both delight and compassion. We should be in our bodies little Israels, miniature versions of Jesus in our circumstances, those who know the difference between the blessedness of delight and the accursedness of debauchery. Of course, it is not always possible to be so blessed and faithful at the same time. At times we may have to be poorer than we would like to be in order to keep our souls from harm. But there is no ideal to be found in this, any more than it ought to be our ideal to keep the poor around us from flourishing in true shalom. If possible, let our lives be written epistles of wonder at the blessings that God lavishes upon us so that we, as God’s people, might go forth and do likewise among those who hunger and thirst in poverty for the coming kingdom of God.

There is much more to say. But these biblical narratives offer us a valuable guide for mapping out the details of economic life. How much to enjoy, to invest, to spend on family; how much to give to church, charities, individuals in need—these are matters for a lifetime. What really matters, however, is that our economic lives spring forth from souls neither too withered for delight nor too hard for compassion. In that harmony we seek the right rhythm for seeking first the kingdom of God.

» See also: Credit

» See also: Credit Card

» See also: Debt

» See also: Financial Support

» See also: Investment

» See also: Power

» See also: Principalities and Powers

» See also: Simpler Lifestyle

» See also: Stewardship

» See also: Wealth

References and Resources

J. Ellul, Money and Power (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1984); J. L. Gonzalez, Faith and Wealth: A History of the Origin, Significance and Use of Money (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990); B. Griffiths, The Creation of Wealth: A Christian’s Case for Capitalism (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1984); Lay Commission on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy, Toward the Future: Catholic Thought and the U.S. Economy (North Tarrytown, N.Y.: Author, 1984); J. Limburg, The Prophets and the Powerless (Atlanta: John Knox, 1977); J. Schneider, Godly Materialism: Rethinking Money and Possessions (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1994); R. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (3rd ed.; Dallas: Word, 1990); R. Van Leeuwen, “Enjoying Creation—Within Limits,” in The Midas Trap (Wheaton, Ill.: Scripture Press/Victor Books, 1990); N. Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983).

—J. Schreider