Chapter 12: Money

I begin by levelling an accusation which I will not fully substantiate, although I will at least try to explain why I do not substantiate it. Despite noble intentions, a great deal of Christian economic ethics has been lamentably supine and bland. Take the venerable theological ethicist Duncan Forrester, who contends on the one hand that theological contributions to the notion of justice 'come from a coherent view of reality'. ^[1] On the other hand, he is concerned that an overly comprehensive Christian approach would be 'unlikely to find general acceptance' in contemporary society. ^[2] Instead of a comprehensive approach, Forrester offers what he calls 'theological fragments'. ^[3] This rather vague tactic flows from the notion that public consensus is a determinative objective of theological ethics, hence my charge that it makes theological ethics rather supine.

This is also the dominant social ethical approach of the public work of my own denomination, the Church of England. Peter Sedgwick, formerly with the Board for Social Responsibility (now the Mission and Public Affairs Division of the Archbishops' Council), speaks of the 'great benefits provided by the Sean Doherty next stage of global capitalism. The churches need to remain part of the debate on reforming and humanizing that world, and not abandoning it for a rhetoric of Christian identity over against that world. Such a task will appear compromised, but . . . it can also be immensely worthwhile.' ^[4]

Kathryn Tanner’s Economy of Grace is an honourable exception in several respects. She forthrightly sketches the characteristics of a genuinely theological economy and argues that 'theological economy encroaches on and enters within the territory of the economy it opposes'. ^[5] But even she makes the fatal mistake of assuming that a theological economy is so far removed from the reality of our world, so that if it simply opposes the world as itis, it will be 'sterile' because it would therefore 'leave the world to its own devices, without practical counsel for realistic change . . . Its only advice would be the complete overhaul of the present system, the simple replacement of the present system with a wholly different one. ^[6] Shying away from this, she instead observes that matters such as wages, tax, inflation versus employment, protectionism and so on are 'up for grabs' within the basic structure of capitalism.

So what I find supine is this. On the one hand, many theologians acknowledge the radical incommensurability between a theologically constituted economy and the existing global capitalist order. On the other hand, the tendency is to sacrifice this radicalism on the altar of improving the way things actually are. The argument seems to be that since we cannot abolish capitalism, we must work within its precincts, to ameliorate its unfortunate corollaries, to make as good a job of it as possible in the circumstances. Thus Christian economist Donald Hay takes as his methodological point of departure Jesus' statement to the Pharisees that Moses allowed divorce 'because you were so hard-hearted' (Matt. 19:8). The principle of monogamous lifelong union is the ideal in creation, but we must 'look for a second best in a fallen world, while continuing to affirm God' first best'. ^[7] His yardstick for arriving at this second best is 'what is practicable in a fallen world'. ^[8] He therefore compares capitalism and communism from a Christian perspective (as if those are the only two options available) and it is hardly surprising when he concludes that a suitably rehabilitated version of capitalism is this second best. It is by no means perfect, but it is vastly preferable to the political and fiscal evils of communism. No doubt that is entirely accurate as far as it goes. But is that as far as we should go? To put it another way, it does not seem to me that Jesus' description of this Mosaic law as a concession to sin is the right methodological starting point for Christian social ethics. In fact, quite the reverse: Jesus explicitly contrasts the way this segment of Torah grounds marriage in the tragedy of fallen reality with God’s original intention in creation. It is clearly the latter which Jesus regards as morally definitive.

So even those who perceive that capitalism is deeply problematic lack a robust constructive theological agenda for economics. Other Christian thinkers do not even consider that it is problematic in the first place. A number of Christian bankers, notably Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint (formerly chief executive of HSBC, also an Anglican priest), Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach (vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs) and Ken Costa (recently chairman of Lazard), perhaps stung by popular accusations of hypocrisy or materialism, have written spirited apologias, displaying a strong degree of theological learning and sophistication in their vindication of their professional lives in terms of Christian vocation. ^[9]

Here again we meet the view that capitalism is imperfect but necessary in the circumstances. Ken Costa admits, 'Over the years I have had my doubts about the market economy …​ This particularly troubled me in recent times, when there seemed to be a headlong, compassionless pursuit of financial reward without restraint. ^[10] Elsewhere he puts this even more strongly: 'The capitalist economy relies on holding money tightly. Christ’s economy is different. ^[11] This latter phrase is telling: he recognizes that Jesus has an economy, and he perceives that it is different from capitalism. Yet he concludes, somewhat incongruously, 'These questions remain: but I have not found a better system [than capitalism]. ^[12]

This truncated survey will have to suffice, and I ask for forbearance for offering a sweeping generalization with such little evidence. By way of an apologia of my own, I have chosen not to spend more time substantiating my critique, in order to avoid falling into the same trap, namely to fail to propose a constructive theological alternative. To summarize these claims, my worry is that, in their eagerness to engage in constructive dialogue with the discipline of economics, some Christian thinkers have signally failed to prioritize theology and have therefore been congenitally hamstrung from developing a stout and properly Christian ethical response. For my own Anglican social tradition, the missional aspect of ethics means taking one’s place as a dialogue partner in the contemporary world. It is missional in the sense that it is at the interface between theology and economics, seeking to make a significant contribution on the 'macro' level to social structures and systems, with all the mess and imperfection which that entails. For the reasons I have just identified, I suspect that this is biting off more than we can chew theologically, At this lofty socialstructural plane, compromise seems to us in our context all but inevitable. Perhaps we will be more successful if we begin by trying to be faithful to the teaching of Jesus on the more modest level of old-fashioned individual discipleship, where we can describe 'Christ’s economy' (Ken Costa’s phrase) in theological terms and actually expect to put it directly into practice.

In other words, I think the problem is precisely that we have been working with an inadequate concept of mission. I am not suggesting that theology should abandon the structural sphere. That is part of God’s mission. I am suggesting that we are so dilapidated in this area because we have not laid good foundations on which to construct something more ambitious. Rather than turning to contemporary economic theory, then, the proper methodological step for a missional ethic of money will be a return to the biblical and historical traditions of Christian thought. A missional ethic of money will resist the impulse to begin with constructive dialogue with economic science. This may come later. But the opening moves will be to proclaim the good news, to call people to repentance and costly discipleship, and to draw on the transforming power of the gospel. My hope is that the following sketch will show the inherent promise of this approach above that of the regnant paradigm.

I have described one trend in recent Christian economic ethics which endorses wealth and capitalism far too readily. But this is in itself an over-reaction to an equally problematic ascetic denial of the goodness of money. The immense dangers of money are clearly alluded to in Scripture, but we should not be so hypnotized by them that we fail to give a suitable account of its goodness, or at the very least an account of its moral neutrality.

Material goods are called 'goods' for good reason. In the creation narratives of Genesis 1 and 2, we hear of the goodness of the world and are shown that God himself is the abundant source of material gifts. He creates humans as physical creatures with physical needs and the capacity for physical enjoyments, and he himself provides the means by which we might satis: enjoy ourselves. Such needs are not spurious. They are part of our bodily nature, which is described as 'very good' (Gen. 1:31). Even the epistle which so famously states that 'the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil' (1 Tim. 6:10) is the same one which condemns those 'who forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving …​ For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving' (1 Tim. 4:3—4). In the earthy and rather carnal narratives of Genesis 1 and 2, physical enjoyments of food and sex pre-date the fall and are not sinful. This context explains why Scripture does not seem to regard having or using money as such as problematic.

'Then God gives humanity work to do in cultivating the garden. The human vocation is to tend something which is already good and fruitful. Little support here, therefore, for a doctrine of wealth creation, but support aplenty for an emphasis on the goodness of human work. The goal of work is not simply to make money. Work is good in itself; it is part of the way in which God has made us, in contrast to Greek philosophy where the goal is unlimited leisure to pursue the higher things in life such as contemplation and virtue. Indeed, even after the fall, the first thing God does for Adam and Eve is to provide them with physical clothing, Again, meeting material needs is no sin—it is God who does it.

In the Gospels, while there is plenty of emphasis on giving up one’s wealth in order to be Christ’s disciples, neither is there an ascetic ethic. Jesus feeds people in large numbers and turns water into a vast quantity of wine. He enjoyed a good party, was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. On one well-publicized occasion he even allowed a woman to waste a lavish amount of pricey perfume on a pedicure. He and his followers shared a common purse and received support from wealthy benefactors. He may even have owned a house. Yet he seems not to have sought or accumulated money and luxuries, and when he sent his followers out on itinerant mission he required of them a particularly strict level of material discipline.

So money in itself is not bad. Indeed, it can be put to genuinely good uses: to meet our legitimate needs for food and clothing, to succour the needy, to spread the gospel. In the words of the adage, money is a good servant, even perhaps a servant of God, but it is a bad master.

This polarity is particularly encapsulated in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus tells us quite unabashedly that we should ask God for our daily bread. Not all interpreters have understood his words this way. Origen claims that 'daily bread' is nota reference to material, physical bread, but to spiritual sustenance. Cyprian hedges his bets and says it is both. But John Chrysostom is surely nearer the mark:

What I find so salutary about Chrysostom’s line of thought is there is no spiritual advantage in the false modesty of pretending we are other than needy physical mortals. Such a pretension would in fact be an idolatrous denial of our creaturely humanity. 'Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?' (Matt. 6:25). Life is more than these things, but it is not less than them.

Let us avail ourselves of a Reformation perspective here as well as a patristic one. Martin Luther had little time for the wealthy. Yet he ferociously opposed the mendicancy movements, in their debased forms, which treated poverty as meritorious. The work of historian Carter Lindberg has been particularly seminal here in exposing the way in which the pre-Reformation system of piety doubly reinforced the conditions of the poor." By their poverty, the poor were beneficiaries of God’s favour and the rich could receive his approval by giving alms to the poor and thus alleviating their plight. Help for the poor was therefore immediate but very temporary, and theologically speaking there was no need for a structural and durable solution to the causes of poverty. Everyone had a vested interest in the status quo. While Luther was under no illusions as to the possibility of the eradication of poverty, he was nevertheless characteristically pugnacious about this state of affairs. In his lectures on Deuteronomy, Luther offers the following comment on God’s famous promise in Deuteronomy 15:4 that 'there will be no poor among yor

Poverty exists, but that does not make it meritorious or beneficial. In Luthet’s exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, he admits that princes in particular need a moderate amount of money. ^[13] But even this seeming concession is morally configured, as he simultaneously insists that such assets are bestowed for the express purpose of looking after one’s subjects properly. That is, even wealth is construed in terms of one’s vocation and responsibility towards others. Luther’s view is therefore that while Christians should not accumulate wealth, neither should they be poor. They may use theit money for two things: to benefit others and to meet their own needs. When he says 'needs', he means 'needs'. Luxury is ruled out.

To return to our reflections on the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus offers us a rationale for the prayer for daily bread, namely that we can trust God to meet our material needs. 'Therefore do not worry, saying, "What will we eat?" or "What will we drink?" or "What will we wear?" For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things' (Matt. 6:3 1-32). We are not to seek after them, then, but to receive what God gives us to meet our needs. Indeed, the subsequent verse makes this promise even more bluntly: 'Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well' (Matt. 6:33). A missional ethic of money will make no bones about a frank appeal to self-interest — but only self-interest which is configured by the kingdom of God and his righteousness is true self-interest.

With this point we begin to approach the other flank of our polarity. Jesus not only promises that God will meet our material needs — he also warns of the terrible danger of serving money. Indeed, it is his laser focus on the trustworthiness of God as Abba Father which means that he is so caustic about hoarding wealth. If we trust God to provide for us daily, on the basis of this promise we will have no need to store up wealth for tomorrow. I find absolutely no basis in the Sermon on the Mount for the ethic of cautious stewardship which is currently bedevilling the church. Quite the opposite: 'Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal' (Matt. 6:19). Jesus demands of us a dynamic of reckless generosity: 'If anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well…​ Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you' (Matt. 5:40—42). Our posture towards worldly goods should fundamentally be one of not holding on to them. We can have things, but we cannot keep them. But this seeming recklessness is undergirded by a more fundamental self-interest. This posture of freely giving away things which appear to be to one’s benefit will ultimately be of far greater benefit.

What benefit exactly? For Chrysostom, Jesus' instruction not to worry about money is not a benign and gentle piece of uplifting advice intended to help us live more rounded lives or some such. It is intended to ensure that we are not damned. The motive for avoiding anxiety is as follows:

The escape route from service of Mammon is not to be anxious, and the strictness of Jesus' instruction is for our own eternal good.

This is particularly well elucidated by Luther. He avers that the two most dangerous forces in Christendom ate false teaching, because it corrupts faith, and greed, because it corrupts the fruit of faith.' ^[15] This connection between faith and one’s handling of money enables Luther to resolve a vexed point in biblical interpretation. Why does the Bible, and Jesus in particular, seem to imply that the rich cannot be saved (e.g., Mark 10:23—27 and pars.; Luke 14:33; 16:19~31)? We know that we are justified by /it). The question follows: If you have faith, how can you fail to be saved even if you are greedy or rich? Can Luther of all people really mean that you are, after all, saved by works?

The answer, of course, is no; and the explanation, of course, is this: the way you handle your possessions is directly related to whether you trust God. As is often stated, faith is not mere mental ascription to a set of correct doctrinal propositions, important as that may be. Rather, faith is a deep trust in God’s goodness towards his creatures. If you see God as someone who is active in the world, someone who is loving and caring, you can trust him to provide for you. If you do not, you will try to provide security for yourself. This inevitably results in hoarding worldly goods in case you need them in the future. Greed is therefore an enslavement from which we need to be liberated by trusting God to care for us and meet our needs. Only this frees us from the neurotic compulsion to acquire more and more in order to be secure.

So greed originates in a lack of trust in God, that is, a lack of faith, a lack precisely of the attitude by which one is made right with God. Hence, according to Luther, a greedy person cannot be justified and therefore cannot be saved, because a greedy person does not trust God. It is not that you earn merit by giving away your possessions. It is that your behaviour discloses the fundamental orientation of your heart. Greed with respect to your money is the correlate of unbelief with respect to your God. For Luther, then, it is absurd to distinguish between trusting God to meet one’s present needs and trusting him to save one’s soul. They ate both expressions of the same thing:

If you do not trust God, you will inevitably be greedy and not generous. You will try to provide for yourself, rather than allow God to look after you. The unspeakable danger of this pseudo-faith is therefore the false assurance which it gives.

The seeming paradox here is only such if one construes 'faith' as a purely intellectual state, a theoretical or mental agreement with particular propositional statements. Such pseudo-faith would of course be entirely compatible with not trusting God to provide for you and meet your needs, and therefore compatible with greed. This is, of course, the point at issue in the letter of James: even demons have a cognitive belief in God, and this is perfectly congruent with failing to help the needy. To quote another epistle about which Luther was not entirely complementary, the faith which pleases God is not simply holding the opinion that he exists, it is believing that he rewards those who earnestly seek him (Heb. 11:6). Famously, of course, in Luther’s early days faith in God was for him at times a monstrous and terrifying affair, given his acute awareness of his failure to measure up to the required standards and his corresponding fear of God’s righteous wrath. ^[17] The breakthrough for him was the recognition that God is pro me and pro nobis. This is the difference between faith which condemns and faith which justifies. Justifying faith believes that God is for me, that he will care for me and act on my behalf.

Thus, in his lectures on Genesis, commenting on the story of the fall in Genesis 3, Luther portrays the essence of sin not as superbia, as Augustine did, not as a lack of belief in God, but as Adam’s and Eve’s lack of trust in God’s settled intention of goodness towards them. The strategy of the serpent is to cast aspersions on the goodness of God’s intention in prohibiting Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, suggesting that God has a sinister ulterior motive behind his command: 'Satan said this to stir up resentment against God …​ that in this way Eve might begin to hate God as though he bore them too little good will' ^[18] Sin arises not so much when Adam and Eve eat the fruit, as when they cease to believe that God has given them the command in order that they might flourish and be blessed. The essence of faith is trusting that God actually wants what is good for you, even if to human perception it may seem otherwise. Faith in this sense of trust in God’s settled goodness (not in some abstract sense, but his goodness pro nobis) cannot coexist with greed, because greed is the compulsion to secure one’s future well-being through one’s own efforts rather than trusting that God will continue giving you your daily bread. Greed is a manifestation of fear of the future and therefore of unbelief. Luther’s conclusion is therefore that if you are greedy, you do not have faith. Hence his seemingly counterintuitive conviction that the greedy will not be saved is not a return by the back door of justification by meritorious deeds, but an insistence that greed and saving faith are incompatible.

But, Luther goes on, there is a further danger here too. Greed also feeds unbelief, because attachment to possessions distracts your heart from God. So a particular reason to flee from greed is that greed affects your faith and therefore your salvation. Thankfully, the opposite is also true: losing or giving money away can help one exercise and strengthen one’s trust in God. Our hearts are incapable of extricating themselves from their enchantment to worldly goods. But when these goods are stripped away, we are prevented from relying on them and forced to trust God instead. Giving things away will not secure your salvation as a matter of reward, but will help to foster faith, the basis of salvation and spiritual growth. A member of the church at which I served my curacy put it to me in this memorable way: 'When I’m worried about money, I give some away.'

Luther therefore describes wealth as a false economy. The cost of being wealthy is in fact greater than the profit: "What will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?" (Mark 8:36). Again, there is a frank appeal to self-interest here, properly understood. Jesus does not instruct his followers to give away their money simply because they ought to. They should give away their money because it is good for them. Mammon is not a good master: on earth, moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal. Instead, we are besought to lay up for ourselves treasure of a far better quality and order.

Here again is our polarity. Money is not evil. | would go so far as to say that it is a gift of God. Butitis also dangerous. Like all God’s gifts, it can be perverted. So, if money can be acquired and used in perverted ways, our next task is to sketch out how it can be acquired and used rightly. Let us consider therefore two points: earning and giving.

In fact, we immediately discover that these are not two points, but one. The biblical locus classicus here is Ephesians 4:28: 'Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labour and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy' Even in the height of the early church’s fervent eschatological expectation, St Paul (I am assuming that he wrote Ephesians and the Thessalonian correspondence) insists that manual labour is ancho:page-251[251] not degrading or pointless. But neither is its purpose to enrich oneself, to accumulate money for one’s own indulgence and comfort. The purpose of earning money is to help others. The very goal of acquiring money is so that you can give it away. Paul’s own period as a tentmaker provides a good example in this regard: working and earning money is no sin — indeed it is compulsory —but the money he gains is used to support his missionary efforts. While money is dangerous, as we have seen, it is also a potential tool in God’s own missional purposes. It can be used by him to enable proclamation of the good news, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and so on.

This does not mean that money can be made any old how. Just as some theologians have been hypnotized by the evil which money can do and have therefore denounced it in an unmitigated fashion, others have been seduced by the sheer power of money to accomplish things. The danger of this is an implicit authorization of a consequentialist moral paradigm where the goal of doing as much good as possible with money justifies the means of making as much of it as possible. This reasoning appears in the notion that because of capitalism’s efficiency with resources and harnessing of incentive to generate vast wealth, it enables philanthropy on a colossal scale which would be quite impossible under socialism. I suspect that is entirely accurate, as far as it goes. But it disregards the fact that while money may be good in itself (or at least morally neutral), it can be acquired in sinful ways. We must interest ourselves not only in what people do with the money they have got, but in how they get it in the first place.

This is another point of intersection between mission and ethics: the invocation of mission as a justification for Christian involvement in a particular way of getting money. But is this what we should mean by mission? Certainly there is no sin in being a Christian merchant or artisan. But this lazy misappropriation of Luther’s concept of vocation as a blanket authorization for involvement in almost any occupation does not stand up to scrutiny. Few of us would accept the need for Christians to become drug dealers or abortionists in order to be salt and light in such worlds. If an activity is inherently wrong, the proper course of action is to call those engaged in it to repent and make amends, and to offer them God’s forgiveness. Similarly, if an activity is not inherently wrong but is currently being performed in an unjust way, the solution is not to participate in the unjust form with a view to reforming it, but to find wholesome alternative ways of acting — even if this means foregoing mainstream patticipation. We need to make up our minds as to the morality of a particular way of earning money as a preliminary to evaluating the validity of Christian involvement in that sphere, rather than taking such involvement as legitimate or necessary and therefore retrospectively justifying its activities.

Let us take a moment, then, to reopen this question. It is not at all transparent that Christian involvement in certain financial industries is an acceptable thing, We do not have space for a full-blown analysis, but let me enumerate some concerns. First, financial practices which rely on or enhance the accrual of capital on a large scale seem questionable in the light of the teaching of Jesus against hoarding which we have just explored. This is also suggested by various aspects of the Torah, which allow the incentive of profit arising from hard work and innovation, but only on a very limited scale and not at the expense of anything but minor levels of inequality. The jubilee legislation in particular, in the name of curbing inequality, would have repressed the things which we would consider indispensable for economic growth and development, such as the accumulation of capital in order to facilitate investment to increase efficiency and specialization. The jubilee legislation would have acted against inequality in two ways: by redistributing profit and by ensuring that everyone had access to the means of supplying their own livelihood rather than being permanently dependent on charity or servitude. ^[19]

Second, the Christian tradition has in the main been opposed to receiving a profit by lending money at interest, and it does not seem to me that the theological and exegetical reasons advanced against this view by Calvin and his supporters are persuasive. ^[20] I have addressed getting money and earning it, as. circumlocutions for the far more popular phrase 'to make money', which I have sought to avoid. This is to make the point that money should not in fact be made by money, but earned by productive work. Luther in particular disliked the practice of making a guaranteed return on lending because it forced the debtor to cover any losses when they were the one who could least afford to do so, while the superior wealth of the creditor put them into a position in which they could take advantage of the debtor without any risk to themselves. This would be ruled out by Christ’s commands to give to everyone who asks and to lend without expecting anything in return (Matt. 5:42; Luke 6:35), and even more fundamentally, to love one’s neighbour as oneself.

Hence, for Luther, the golden rule functions here as a rule of thumb to check if a transaction is just, by envisioning a reversal of situations. If the creditor would not want to trade places with the debtor, then the creditor is taking advantage of him. If the potential debtor is in need, the putative creditor should simply give him his surplus money. And if the potential debtor is not in need, then the creditor should give his excess money to someone who is, rather than lend it out in order to further enrich himself. For this older school of Christian thought, money should be earned by making something or providing some service which is actually of direct benefit to another person —I suspect the thinkers whom I have interacted with here would hardly have been convinced by the theory of benefit by trickle-down!

Counterintuitively, this rejection of involvement in many aspects of the stem is a profoundly m discriminate ethic of involvement which I have criticized, the medieval approach which I have advocated claims that the financial arena belongs to Christ at a far more fundamental level. Rather than envisaging it as an essentially wicked sphere into which Christians must venture in order to improve it and rescue unbelievers through conversion, the traditional Christian approach assumes that the whole thing already belongs to Christ and that activity within it should therefore conform to his teaching right now and not to some alien interim ethic. This is not to disapprove of attempts to reform this sphere or to convert its occupants. It is to say that we may not treat the commands of Jesus as an impossible and idealistic bit of hyperbole, nor are we at liberty to pretend that as grown-up Christians we cannot avoid a compromise with the way the world actually is. In any interaction with another person, we must not put ourselves above them, but should love them as ourselves, emptying ourselves and taking the very nature of a servant in order to benefit them, as Christ has done for us. Self-interest and profit are ruled out as motives and replaced with the intention that our neighbour should flourish.

So, let us summarize our comments about earning, While we have discovered Paul’s emphasis on earning money in order to give it away, we have argued that this does not offer authorization either for earning a particularly large quantity of money, or for earning it in an illicit way, which I suggest includes most forms of lending at interest, though not investment where the risk is shared. While money can indeed be a tool of God in his missional purposes, the good it can accomplish does not give carte blanche as to how it is accrued.

Before we end, let us make some brief comments about giving, We have noted the dangers in hoarding money. The natural question to ask is, therefore, how much money should we give away? It is important to be concrete about this, and not vague, and help is at hand from the masterly pen of St Thomas Aquinas. Thomas is fairly upbeat about the notion of property as such, although like Luther and Paul he configures it in terms of responsibiliy towards others. He is unambiguous in his disapproval of theft as an intrinsically evil act which can never be justified. Yet he goes on to make the following claim. If someone in needs asks you for food and you refuse it, but they then take your food (or take money in order to buy food), they have done no wrong, He explains it as follows:

So the one who took what they urgently needed has not committed theft. But Thomas presses his claim further: the person who originally refused to help the needy one /as committed theft, because they have deprived a person of what they are rightfully due. The allocation of goods is a human matter which cannot over-rule the original divine purpose in giving these material goods to humanity in the first place, hence Thomas’s claim that whatever one has left over after meeting one’s own needs is 'due to the purpose' of helping those who need it. He therefore quotes Ambrose as follows: 'It is the hungry man’s bread that you withhold, the naked man’s cloak that you store away, the money that you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man’s ransom and freedom. ^[22] Indeed, in cases of 'extreme indigence' Thomas considers it praiseworthy even to forego your own requirements in order to help others. ^[23]

It is not difficult to see some burning implications of this in a world in which not only relative but also absolute poverty is rife, where literally millions of people have nowhere to live, no electricity, no access to basic sanitation, and where over a million people die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and another million due to easily preventable diseases. The amounts we spend on bottled water, perfume, fizzy drinks and pet food, let alone on nuclear weapons, dwarfs the sums needed to change these realities, for example, to pay for basic education, sanitation, food and drink for all. The logic of capitalism tells us that 'it is not as simple as that', and that if we give our money away the system would simply collapse and everyone would end up worse off. And of course there are political reasons, as well as corruption and waste, which prevent charity actually helping those who need it. Prudence has a role to play in enabling wise decisions about how and where one gives, and a particularly good example of this can be found in the 'Giving What We Can' movement set up by utilitarian philosopher Toby Ord (www.givingwhatwecan.org), which takes empirical research seriously in ensuring that charitable giving is as effective as possible.

However, the ideology of capitalism blinds us to what we can do and are obliged to do, because it operates on this macro-utilitarian level of trying to secure the optimal long-term consequences for the whole world and indeed for history itself. The more we spend on luxury goods, the more we will help the poor — eventually. Of course, it takes time for improvements to trickle down, but this will be for the greater good in the long run as it will prevent people from being dependent on handouts. It is poverty which is natural, not wealth, and so instead of blaming the rich for the condition of the poor and handing over our wealth to them, which would be counterproductive, we should help the poor create wealth for themselves. But this seems difficult to reconcile with the biblical witness to the original abundance of creation and the analysis of the causes of poverty offered us by the biblical prophets. Certainly it did not convince Chrysostom, who was adamant that scarcity was always caused by sin. To an economist this view appears roughly as credible as the opinion that the world was created in six literal days, and it is very difficult for us to stop ourselves from investing the discipline of economics with neutral scientific status. But even if we ignore the material implications this logic has for the needy, we should not ignore the damage it will do in the meantime to our very souls. Again, the golden rule applies here: if we were destitute (cither in relative or absolute terms), we would want those with means at their disposal to offer us immediate and not deferred assistance, rather than spending their money on things which they do not strictly need and of which we could only dream.

Let us draw this rather contentious essay towards a close with some reflections on what it might mean to be missional in this area. The ethic I have sought to propose is missional because it claims the territory of money as Christ’s territory. It is not grubby or ignoble, but part of his good creation. Thus we see that the problem with accounts of economics which assume that we need to make compromises with the way things are is not that they are excessively positive about money. The problem is quite the opposite: they are insufficiently aware of its goodness and therefore make insufficient moral claims with respect to it.

This ethic is also missional because it joyfully and vigorously proclaims the good news, namely that we can trust God to look after us, right here, and right now. This is crucial because, in the face of the sheer magnetic power of human greed, ethics will tend to quail and water itself down to a more manageable standard unless it is undergirded by substantial and potent theological realities. Luther saw that Pelagianism can manifest itself in two related ways with God’s seemingly unattainable moral standards, the first and more familiar instantiation of this heresy pretends that with effort, human abilities can meet the requisite level of obedience. Yet Luther perceived that the likely outcome of this was Pelagianism’s more subtle tendency, namely to dilute the required moral standards to a mote practicable level. A seemingly legalistic facade hides an antinomian reality. Only greater confidence in God’s freely given and abundant forgiveness and transforming power will liberate us to acknowledge the height of his commandments.

This transforming power is needed in other ways too. Our greed means that we cannot simply set out the right norms and follow them. We first need to be set free from our white-knuckle grip on possessions. This is given to us in faith, which of course is a posture of receiving rather than earning, We receive from God abundantly, so we can give away generously. Faith thus has concrete economic implications.

Again, this makes our point that a theological economic ethic is viable only if it is undergirded by a good theology and missiology. Hilary of Poitiers declares that Jesus 'removes all concern for things of the present' on the basis that we are 'thunderstruck by the hope of the future'. ^[24] It is the dynamic connection between these two things which we have sought to explore here. The failure of much Christian economic ethics to draw on the moral stipulations of the New Testament is perhaps a result of its failure to draw on the eschatological hope of the New Testament and the transforming resources of the gospel. It is not enough to simply tell people what to do. This will not only fail to change their behaviour, it will also tend towards the subversion of the moral standards themselves. So an ethic of money which is not missional in this robust theological sense will not be very ethical either. To be ethical, our ethic of money needs to be missional.

This is why Jesus' teaching suggests that our missional ethic of money must be missional not only in the wide sense that Missio Dei carries of serving the world, loving our neighbour, caring for creation and so on, but also in the classic evangelistic sense of concern for people’s eternal salvation. In particular, those of us called to the pastoral and teaching offices of the church must be entirely candid with those for whom we are responsible about the eternal risk which wealth carries. We have had cause to remind ourselves that money and material possessions are not bad in themselves. There is no sin in eating and enjoying food or wearing clothing, perhaps no sin in owning a car or a house. But we must remain acutely aware of how dangerous is the love of money. Money, sex, power, food and so on ate all good gifts of God, intended for our enjoyment and to enable us to flourish, but they are perilous to the point of perdition when loved too much and so misused. And indeed the risk of owning too much is so high that we must ourselves err on the side of caution, and encourage others to do the same.

© Sean Doherty, 2012