On Riches in the Bible and the West Today

he Christian’s proper relationship with wealth has generated controversy in the church for much of church history. There have always been those who claim the Christian must renounce wealth and voluntarily accept poverty. There have also been those who claim that God will prosper the Christian. These differences can be explained by the tensions in the Bible regarding the proper relationship between God’s people and material possessions. On the one hand, God promised prosperity to Israel if Israel kept God’s commandments. On the other hand, Jesus said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. Many American Christians regard themselves as rich, at least when the discussion turns to the Bible and the Bible’s teachings on wealth and poverty. A sermon on the story of the rich young ruler often includes a statement that we Christians in America today are rich, so we cannot dismiss the passage as not relevant to ourselves. Such a warning is probably appropriate. There is no question that the typical American or western European is not poor. Based strictly on consumption possibilities, even many poor of the modern rich countries would be considered rich by historical standards. Modern Americans are able to consume at high levels, and certainly Christians have a responsibility to help the poor materially, politically, and sympathetically. There are some Christians who go further and virtually equate affluence with oppression. Poverty is seen as “. . . the result of the injustice of the rich and powerful” (McGovern 1989, p. 70). A prominent liberation theologian wrote, “There are poor because there are people who are the victims of other people. . . . The prophets condemn every kind of abuse. . .” (Gutierrez 1996, p. 295). He then lists a series of actions condemned by the prophets, including fraudulent commerce, dishonest courts, slavery, unjust taxes, and unjust functionaries. Ronald Sider, in the first edition of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, quotes several Old Testament prophets and concludes, “Because the rich oppress the poor and weak, the Lord of history is at work pulling down their houses and kingdoms” (Sider 1977). It is tempting to conclude that the attacks on the wealthy found in Scripture apply to middle-class Americans. I think this is a mistake, though, for two reasons. For many purposes wealth needs to be considered in relative and not in absolute terms. Second, the form of wealth today is quite different from the form of wealth in Biblical times. The affluence of middle-class America is different from the wealth of those described in the Bible as rich. The distinction between income and wealth is important, as is the distinction between human capital and non-human capital forms of wealth. At least some of the sins the Old Testament prophets charged against the rich in their day are not available for the average American Christian. Further, the marketable wealth of most Americans is considerably less than many think, as data from the Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve Board show. The purpose of this paper is to develop a more nuanced examination of the concept of wealth with respect to participants in modern market economies.