Wealth and Possessions

The Bible does not speak about wealth with one voice, and a teacher who quotes only one of its voices will mislead. The first voice calls wealth a gift. 'Abram had become extremely wealthy in livestock and silver and gold' (Genesis 13:2), and the text tells it as blessing. 'The blessing of the LORD enriches, and He adds no sorrow to it' (Proverbs 10:22). The wise man's diligence brings plenty: 'Idle hands make one poor, but diligent hands bring wealth' (Proverbs 10:4). Deuteronomy says plainly that 'it is the LORD your God who gives you the power to gain wealth' (Deuteronomy 8:18).

The second voice calls wealth a danger, and it is often found in the very same passages. Two verses before Deuteronomy 8:18 is the warning: 'You might say in your heart, "The power and strength of my hands have made this wealth for me"' (Deuteronomy 8:17). The psalmist says, 'If your riches increase, do not set your heart upon them' (Psalm 62:10). The best known prayer about money in the Old Testament asks for neither extreme: 'Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the bread that is my portion. Otherwise, I may have too much and deny You, saying, "Who is the LORD?" Or I may become poor and steal, profaning the name of my God' (Proverbs 30:8-9). Craig Blomberg took the title of his biblical theology of possessions from that prayer: Neither Poverty nor Riches (1999).

The prayer in Proverbs 30 is worth pausing over, because it names two different dangers. Wealth tempts a person to forget God, because he no longer feels his need. Poverty tempts a person to steal and so dishonour God, because the need is crushing. Scripture does not romanticise either condition. It does not say the poor are holy because they are poor, and it does not say the rich are blessed because they are rich. It says both are under God, both are exposed to particular temptations, and both are answerable for what they do.

The anchor passage holds both voices in two sentences. It does not tell the rich to stop being rich. It tells them three things not to do, be conceited, put their hope in wealth, forget that it came from God, and three things to do: 'to do good, to be rich in good works, and to be generous and ready to share' (1 Timothy 6:18). And it does something many sermons on money forget: it says God 'richly provides all things for us to enjoy' (6:17). Enjoyment is not the enemy of generosity in Paul. Conceit and false hope are.

Jesus' words on wealth are the sharpest in scripture. 'Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God' (Luke 6:20), and four verses later, 'But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort' (6:24). 'You cannot serve both God and money' (Matthew 6:24), where the word behind money is mamonas, from an Aramaic word for wealth, here treated almost as a rival god. He told the parable of the man who built bigger barns and died that night, and ended it, 'This is how it will be for anyone who stores up treasure for himself but is not rich toward God' (Luke 12:21). And to one rich man he said, 'Go, sell everything you own and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me' (Mark 10:21), adding to his disciples that 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God' (10:25).

The church has read these words in three main ways, and each has serious defenders. The first reading takes them as a call to actual renunciation, binding at least on some and, in some forms, on all who would follow Jesus fully. When Antony of Egypt heard Matthew 19:21 read in church, around the year 270, he went out and gave away his inheritance, as Athanasius tells in his Life of Antony. Francis of Assisi did the same in the thirteenth century, and the Anabaptist Hutterites have held their goods in common since the sixteenth, pointing to Acts 2:44-45 and 4:32. Defenders of this reading say that Luke 14:33 is addressed to the crowds, not to one man, and that the church has always found ways to make the camel smaller.

The second reading, developed in Catholic teaching, distinguishes commands that bind all Christians from counsels of perfection offered to some. Matthew's version has Jesus say, 'If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions' (Matthew 19:21), and on this reading poverty, together with chastity and obedience, is a counsel taken up by those called to religious life, while all Christians are bound by the commandments, including justice and generous almsgiving. Defenders note that Jesus did not ask Zacchaeus to sell everything, that women of means supported his ministry (Luke 8:3), and that Peter told Ananias his land had been his own (Acts 5:4).

The third reading, common among Protestants and already present in Clement of Alexandria around the year 200, treats the command to the rich man as a diagnosis of one man's idol, so that what is binding on all is the inward surrender of possessions to Christ, shown in generosity and readiness to give up anything he asks. Defenders point out that Paul's charge to the rich in 1 Timothy 6 is exactly this, and that Jesus himself said the impossible is possible with God (Mark 10:27). Critics of this reading, from the first and second camps, reply that inward detachment is easy to claim and hard to check, and that it has allowed comfortable Christians to hear Jesus' hardest words as being about someone else. A student should be able to state all three and should notice that all three agree on more than they dispute: wealth is dangerous, trust must rest in God alone, and the poor have a claim on the believer's possessions.

The early church fathers spoke about wealth in terms that shock modern readers, including many conservative ones. They are worth hearing in their own register, because they were pastors in cities with extremes of wealth and poverty not unlike the cities many students live in today.

Clement of Alexandria wrote the first surviving treatise on the subject, Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved?, around the year 200. He argued that Jesus' command to the rich man was about stripping the soul of its passions, not merely throwing money away, and that wealth is an instrument which can be used justly or unjustly. A person who gives everything away and remains greedy has gained nothing; a person who holds wealth loosely and uses it for others may be saved. Clement's treatise became the charter for Christians who believed the rich could be saved without ceasing to be rich, and his critics have always said it made Jesus' words too comfortable.

Basil of Caesarea, preaching in Cappadocia in the years around the famine of 368, gave a homily on the rich fool of Luke 12. He told his hearers, in substance, that the bread they held back belonged to the hungry, the coat stored in their chest to the naked, the shoes rotting in their house to the barefoot, and the silver they had buried to the needy, so that they wronged as many people as they could have helped. Basil did not only preach. Around the year 370 he built outside Caesarea a great complex for the poor and sick, with lodging, a hospital and workshops, which came to be called the Basileias. Ambrose of Milan, in his work On Naboth, told the rich that when they gave to the poor they were not making a gift from what was theirs but returning to the poor what was the poor man's own, because the earth was given to all in common. John Chrysostom, in his sermons on the rich man and Lazarus, said that not to share one's wealth with the poor is to rob them.

Augustine gave the church a distinction that runs under almost all later teaching. In On Christian Teaching (book 1) he distinguished things to be enjoyed, which are loved for their own sake, from things to be used, which are loved for the sake of something else. Only God is to be enjoyed in the full sense; everything else, wealth included, is to be used in the love of God and neighbour. Thomas Aquinas later built a theory of property on this foundation. In the Summa Theologiae (II-II, question 66) he argued that private ownership is lawful and necessary for the care and management of things, because people look after what is their own and quarrel less when ownership is clear, but that the use of things should be common, so that a person readily shares them with others in need. He went further: in a case of urgent and evident need, when there is no other remedy, a person who takes what he needs to survive does not commit theft. That principle is still taught in Catholic social teaching as the universal destination of goods.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached a sermon called The Use of Money that reduced Christian economics to three rules: 'Gain all you can', 'Save all you can', 'Give all you can.' By the first he meant honest work that harms neither your body, your soul nor your neighbour. By the second he meant not wasting money on luxury and display, not piling it up. By the third he meant that everything beyond what a household truly needs belongs to God and the poor. Wesley warned that Methodists who followed the first two rules without the third would grow rich and lose their souls, and he lived on a modest income all his life while his book sales brought in large sums that he gave away.

In the twentieth century, Ronald Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (1977) pressed the same call on Western evangelicals, proposing among other things a graduated tithe in which the percentage given rises as income rises. In 1980 the Lausanne movement and the World Evangelical Fellowship held an international consultation at Hoddesdon in England that produced An Evangelical Commitment to Simple Life-style, calling Christians to resist consumerism and to give sacrificially for the poor and for the gospel. Defenders of simplicity point to the poor widow who gave 'all she had to live on' (Luke 21:4), to the Macedonians whose 'deep poverty overflowed into rich generosity' (2 Corinthians 8:2), and to Jesus' word that 'where your treasure is, there your heart will be also' (Matthew 6:21).

There is another side, and it too is held by serious Christians. Some critics of Sider, such as David Chilton in Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators (1981), argued that his proposals confused personal generosity with state redistribution and induced guilt rather than gratitude. More moderate voices worry that simplicity can become a new legalism, measured by the cheapness of a person's shoes, and that it can breed spiritual pride. They point out that Jesus came 'eating and drinking' and was accused of being a glutton (Luke 7:34), that he attended weddings and feasts, that the law commanded festivals at which Israel was to rejoice before the Lord, and that the anchor verse itself says God provides 'all things for us to enjoy' (1 Timothy 6:17). For them the question is not how little a Christian has but whether he trusts God, enjoys God's gifts with thanks, and shares them gladly.

Both sides are reading real texts. The honest course is not to pick a winner but to let each side check the other. Simplicity without enjoyment becomes grim and proud; enjoyment without generosity becomes the barn-builder of Luke 12. Paul's charge holds both together: do not hope in wealth, enjoy what God gives, be rich in good works, share. For most students the immediate application will not be about luxury at all, but about whether a little is held with an open hand or a closed one. Paul says that the Macedonians, who had little, gave 'according to their ability and even beyond it' (2 Corinthians 8:3).

The prosperity gospel teaches, in its common forms, that God wills every believer to be healthy and wealthy, that faith spoken aloud releases these blessings, and that giving money to God, often to a particular ministry, is a seed that God is bound to return many times over. Its modern roots are in North America, in the Word of Faith teaching of Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland and the seed faith teaching of Oral Roberts, and it has spread widely through television, radio, phone and large independent churches in Africa, Latin America and Asia. The Pew Research Center's ten-country survey of Pentecostals, Spirit and Power (2006), found that in nine of the ten countries surveyed most Pentecostals agreed that God will grant material prosperity to all believers who have enough faith.

Its preachers are not without texts, and the student should know them. 'Bring the full tithe into the storehouse ... See if I will not open the windows of heaven and pour out for you blessing without measure' (Malachi 3:10). 'Honor the LORD with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your crops; then your barns will be filled with plenty' (Proverbs 3:9-10). 'I pray that in every way you may prosper and enjoy good health' (3 John 1:2). Its defenders also say something true: that God cares about bodies and bread, that poverty is not holy, that the gospel brings hope and discipline into lives wrecked by despair, drink and debt, and that sociologists of Pentecostalism have observed real economic improvement among converts who stop drinking, start saving and keep their families together.

The great majority of the world's churches, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, judge the core of the prosperity gospel to be false teaching, not a disputable matter, and the student should hear the reasons. The Lausanne Theology Working Group, meeting in Akropong, Ghana, in 2008 and 2009, issued a statement that affirmed God's care for the whole person while rejecting the teaching that wealth is a guaranteed reward for faith or giving. The texts above are promises to a covenant people about faithfulness, or a greeting in a letter, not a mechanism by which a believer obliges God. The New Testament speaks of believers who are poor, persecuted and hungry, including the apostle who learned 'the secret of being filled and being hungry, of having plenty and having need' (Philippians 4:12). And the anchor's own chapter names the very thing: teachers of whom Paul says, 'These men regard godliness as a means of gain', followed at once by 'Of course, godliness with contentment is great gain' (1 Timothy 6:5-6).

The deepest objection is pastoral. A teaching that promises wealth to all who believe will tell the widow whose child died, and the farmer whose crop failed, that their faith was too small. It takes money from the poor to make preachers rich, and it turns giving, which scripture treats as grace and gladness (2 Corinthians 9:7), into a transaction. The Apologetics track's lesson False Teaching and New Religions examines the movement more fully and shows how to speak with people caught up in it. Here the ethical point is simpler. Paul tells the rich not to put their hope in wealth; the prosperity gospel tells the poor to put their hope in it.

Turn to a new page in your casebook and write: Case 2, Wealth and Possessions. Use the same four headings as before: The situation. The texts. The positions. What I would counsel, and why.

This time the situation is partly your own. Take your notebook and phone and, from memory or from your mobile money or bank record, write down roughly where your money went in the last month: food, rent, school fees, transport, family obligations, church, savings, debt, other. You do not need exact figures. Then answer three questions in writing: What share, if any, went to giving? What is the one expense you feel uneasy about? And what does your family or community expect you to do with money, for instance supporting relatives, contributing to funerals and weddings, or displaying success, that scripture either supports or questions?

Then choose one real question about wealth from your church or community to work as the case. It might be a member pressured to give to a preacher who promises a hundredfold return, a successful businessman unsure whether he should give away more, a family spending far beyond its means on a funeral, or a congregation divided over a new building. Describe it without names and without details that would identify anyone. Write out three texts from this lesson that bear on it, state the readings of Jesus' words or the views on simplicity that apply, each at the strength its defenders would accept, and write your counsel. End by writing one concrete act of generosity you will do this week, its cost, and the day you will do it.