I’ve never been much interested in, or very good at, managing money. Fortunately, I didn’t need to be. I had savvy ancestors. The best financial advice I can give is: Choose your parents wisely.
My paternal grandparents owned a grocery store in what’s called the “South End” of Columbus, Ohio, and invested their profits in rental real estate. When they died, my two brothers and I inherited a couple dozen properties. Though they were in a declining area of the city, they were profitable enough to provide a welcome trickle of passive income as I pursued my Master’s and doctoral studies.
My father inherited my grandparents’ financial skill. A medical doctor with a business degree, he made careful investments and bought rental properties of his own. He was wealthy enough to distribute portions of our inheritance when my brothers and I were starting out, when we most needed his help. Papa bought a house for my family in Alabaster, Alabama, which reduced our living expenses enough for me to serve as pastor of a small, poor church. We sold that house to fund three years in Cambridge, but, mysteriously, returned from England with enough money to make a substantial down payment on a house in Idaho, which kept costs manageable as I taught at New Saint Andrews College, then a tiny start-up operation. We sold our Idaho house when we moved back to Alabama, and used the proceeds to purchase another – our final – home. My father’s gift has kept us domiciled for decades.
We survived, and flourished, because of my father’s generosity and my wife’s frugality. Apart from periodic stints in higher education, I’ve been employed all my adult life, but my salary has never been very high, especially for the head of a family of twelve. Most of my adult children make far more money than I ever made. We’ve lived on next to nothing; we’ve lived on just enough; we now live comfortably – all because of my wife’s steady hand. My other best (not second-best) financial advice: Marry up.
What I lack in practical prowess, I’ve (slightly) made up in theoretical interest in money. I’ve been able to learn the basics, both by pondering my father’s example and by exploring the Scriptures. One of the main things I’ve learned is: Money isn’t what we think it is, and it’s not for what we think it’s for.
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The question, “What is money?” is prior to the question, “What do we do with money?” And the Bible’s answer to the first question is, Money is a power. It’s one of the rulers of this age.
“The rich rules over the poor,” Solomon says (Prov. 22:7). It’s an observation rather than a value judgment. Whether in the form of status, honor, reputation, fame, or stock portfolios and bank accounts, wealth confers power – the power to purchase things and people’s time, the power to mold life according to our desires, the power to control outcomes and to avoid or recover from damage. Kings are wealthy because wealth makes kings. Wealth rules.
Solomon means it when he says money guards us as wisdom guards us (Eccl. 7:12). He’s not being ironic when he writes that “money is the answer to everything” (Eccl. 10:19). Wealth is a fortress (Prov. 10:15) and a strong city (Prov. 19:4). Money keeps the wolf from the door. Wealth purchases a gated community, a home security system, and, at the upper echelons, private police protection. Wealth is a Get-Out-of-Jail card that buys the best lawyers and, in some cases, compliant judges.
Wealth isn’t simply a protective power. Money acts. Global corporations can transform a small town, or an entire country, by out-sourcing manufacturing. Wealth expands the imagination. A billionaire has resources to alter the political landscape through well-placed donations or a well-funded think tank, by serving cocktails to select fellow billionaires and politicos. The rest of us know our measly campaign contributions accomplish next to nothing. We lack the power to dream of nudging the system in our desired direction.
Wealth is a power because it’s the most protean of all human institutions. Money is a magical substance that can be translated into anything – into bread and wine, into lands and buildings, into clothing and jewelry, into factories and machines, into electric cars and spaceships, into sexual fantasies. In our Vanity Fair economy, everything’s up for sale. Jesus turned water to wine; a rich man turns computer blips into a vineyard. The wealthy are real-life alchemists for whom turning paper into gold is a daily miracle.
The Scriptures warn about wealth not because it’s useless but because it’s charged with quasi-divine potency. It’s more powerful than any other weapon because it can gain control of every other weapon. Handling wealth is more dangerous than playing with live wires, and only the mature and wise know how to channel its power effectively and justly. We require teens to be trained and licensed before putting them behind the wheel of large, fast-moving machines. Perhaps we should license bank accounts.
Given the power and risk of wealth, we might expect Scripture to counsel ascetic avoidance. It doesn’t. On the contrary, in many places, it revels in riches. Abram and Jacob accumulate slaves, flocks, and herds. Job is the wealthiest man of the east before he loses everything, but his end is more luxurious than his beginning. Solomon imports so much precious metal that silver becomes as common as stones (1 Kgs. 10:27). The accounts of the tabernacle and temple measure the gold, gold, gold of Yahweh’s house, and the book of Numbers lingers with obsessive repetition silver dishes, silver bowls, and gold pans presented to Yahweh from the plunder of Egypt. Numbers 7 could have been written by an ancient Hebrew Scrooge ben McDuck.
Yet Scripture is too full of warnings and cautions to support prosperity gospels.
Wealth induces amnesia:
“Beware, that you do not forget the Lord your God . . . when you have eaten and are satisfied, and have built good houses and lived in them, and when your herds and your flocks multiple, and our silver and gold multiply, and all that you have multiplies, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God” (Deut. 8:10-14).
Money blocks the gate to the kingdom:
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matt. 19:24).
Greed shrinks life down to what we own:
“Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions” (Luke 12:15).
We’ve got a stark choice to make:
“No man can serve two masters . . . You cannot serve God and Mammon” (Mark 6:24).
Of course, these are warnings against trusting in riches. Nowhere does the Bible forbid riches. But we’re at risk if we underestimate the lure of Mammon. Money, to repeat, is a power, and a seductive one. Wealth rules; if we let it, it will rule us.
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“Give me neither poverty nor riches,” Old Agur prays (Prov. 30:7-9). Excessive wealth tempts us to prideful denial of God (see Deut. 8:11-20). Grinding poverty can provoke covetousness, envy, and theft. Best to be somewhere in the middle.
Agur speaks wisdom, but it’s not the deepest wisdom. At base, the biblical management of wealth isn’t a balancing act. Scripture upends our expectations about the uses of money at a more basic level. It’s neither “Buy nothing” nor “Buy everything, for all is a good gift of God.” And it’s not, as in the late Gary North’s gloss on Agur’s prayer, “Make me middle class.”
Rather, the Bible teaches that money doesn’t exist primarily for things at all. Money is a token of personal relation, a sacrament of communion. If money is a philosopher’s stone, its primary power is to translate base metals into allies.
That interpersonal emphasis starts near the beginning of the Bible. As Luigino Bruni observes, the Bible’s first mentions money, exchange, a market, and price negotiation in Genesis 23, when Abraham buys a plot for Sarah’s tomb. The value of the property isn’t merely economic, but bound up the promise of Yahweh, Abraham’s hopes for his progeny, and the conversion of land into a quasi-sacred “place.” Notably, the determination of price isn’t merely economic either. Abraham and the sons of Heth talk about price, but their haggling is embedded in an interpersonal market of honor: “the selling price is shown as an almost marginal detail inside a conversation in which generous offers, praises and recognitions of dignity and honour are exchanged by the counterparts.” It shows “economic exchanges . . . are encounters of persons” and “the first merchandise to be exchanged at the market are words.”
This personalist conception undergirds the Proverbs’ warnings about accumulation. “A man with an evil eye hastens after wealth, and does not know that want will come upon him” (Prov. 28:22). We shouldn’t miss the counterintuitive paradox of Solomon’s warning. An “evil eye” is an eye focused on protecting wealth, but why is it evil? It seems like a virtue: Attentive wealth management is the path to plenty, not want. Naturally, it seems that hoarding goods is the best way to ensure we don’t lack anything. Solomon says the opposite. Why?
He explains in a companion proverb a few verses later: “He who gives to the poor will never want, but he who hides his eyes will have many curses” (Prov. 28:27). Here is an inverse paradox from that of verse 22: Gathering and hoarding wealth leads to want, while divesting ourselves of wealth ensures we’ll never want. We can sharpen the paradox: The divestment Solomon mentions isn’t investment, but charity. Giving to the poor seems like dumping money in an economic black hole, but Solomon says it’s the path to financial security. There’s that “eye” again, this time covered or closed. We should think the eye of verses 22 and 27 together: The evil eye is closed to the poor because its field of vision is cluttered with the apparatus of accumulating, preserving, and increasing treasure. Eyes dazzled by the glitter of Mammon are blinded to human flesh, especially if the flesh hasn’t had a recent shower (see Isa. 58:7).
Augustine said spiritual goods like knowledge are possessed only by dispossession; we truly have them only if we give them away. Augustine failed to grasp the spirituality of biblical economics. For Solomon, material goods too are owned only in the mode of gifts-received, retained only in the mode of gifts-given. For Solomon, divestment is investment. And that’s true because money is a sacrament of communion.
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That Jesus shares this personalist perspective on money is most evident in His puzzling parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16:1-13). A rich man dismisses his steward because of a report that the steward is misusing his wealth. The steward acts quickly to secure his position in the interim between his dismissal and public knowledge of his dismissal. While his employer’s debtors still think the steward is in charge, he reduces the debts owed by 20-50%.
The debtors are overjoyed, of course, and the steward puts the master is in a tough spot. Assuming the steward acted on his employer’s behalf, the debtors are grateful. The steward has done is former boss a favor, by bolstering his reputation for generosity, and the rich man would be loath to correct the misimpression by insisting, on the contrary, that he wants payment in full. If the rich man goes ahead with his plan to fire the steward, the steward has allies to turn to. But the rich man may not go through with it, lest he appear mean-spirited and ungenerous, and lose honor among his peers.
Jesus commends the steward because he knows what money is for: “Make friends for yourselves by means of the mammon of unrighteousness” (Luke 16:9). The steward is shrewder in the treasure of this age than the sons of light. In context, this is what it means to be faithful in the “little thing” of managing money. Jesus doesn’t suddenly start talking about wise portfolio management. We prove ourselves faithful in little things and deserving of having true riches entrusted to us when we follow the steward’s example of making friends with mammon (Luke 16:10-11).
Jesus pushes the point a necessary, theological step further. If we make friends by using mammon, we’ll be received into “eternal dwellings” when mammon fails (Luke 16:9). Jesus isn’t being hyperbolic or metaphorical. Earlier in Luke, Jesus urges His disciples to be “rich toward God” and to store up “treasures in heaven” (12:21, 33) by “selling” possessions and “giving to charity” (12:33). Divestment is investment because God exists, because there is a just and generous Father who balances the cosmic books and rewards those who are merciful as He is merciful. If this seems mercenary, it’s because we still don’t grasp what money is: Giving to the poor doesn’t purchase God’s favor, but is a quasi-sacramental token of our friendship with God.
Money makes friends, and the only question is which friends we’re trying to make. Are we making friends of the world, or are we using our money in a way that makes us friends with God? Are we deploying resources to buy connections with the wealthy, powerful, and famous, so we can bask in their glory and get return invitations and benefits from them? Or are we using our wealth to honor God and seek a reward in the resurrection of the just? Who’s on our guests list – the mighty and rich, or the poor, weak, and lame? Generosity is always shadowed by the possibility of Godfathering. We’re tempted to be generous to the destitute to purchase a payback of loyalty and service. Which is why, always and everywhere, we remember we spend and give before the face of, and in imitation of our Father, who gives generously and without reproach. We can give without thought of return only when we seek return from our Father (Luke 6:30, 38).
The apostles operate in the same framework, with a missional twist. As soon as the Spirit falls, believers are united in their communion in apostolic teaching, table fellowship, prayer, and goods (Acts 2:43-47). Their unity of heart and soul is expressed in sacrificial financial gifts; many sell lands and other property to donate the proceeds to the apostles, who distribute the donations so there are no poor among them (Acts 4:32-35). As the church expands beyond Jerusalem, the communion of goods expands with it. Paul collects funds from Gentile churches and brings them to Jerusalem as famine relief. In Paul’s view, this exchange is as much to promote communion between Jew and Gentile as it is to feed hungry Jews. Gentiles have shared in the spiritual wealth of Israel, so they’re obligated to share material goods with Jews (Rom. 15:22-29). The body of Christ is knit together by a reciprocal form of “equality” (isotes): The abundance of one supplies the need of another, so, in the future, the abundance of the second can supply the need of the first (2 Cor. 8:13-15).
The church is unified by the word and by ritual sacraments – the washing of baptism and the table fellowship of the Eucharist. Equally, the church is united by the sacrament of money, which, exchanged across ancient boundaries, contributes to the breaking down of the dividing wall, the end of enmity, and reconciliation all in the one new humanity.
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Much of the common wisdom of Christian investing can find a place within this framework, though it will be differently flavored. My experience provides a test case.
My father invested to make a profit. He wasn’t extravagant, but he liked to eat out and buy nice things, especially a new luxury car every few years. But his main investment aim was to do good for people, and first of all to the people closest to him: He wanted to provide for my mother and their three sons during our childhood, and to have a surplus to give us a jump start as we entered adulthood. That jump start didn’t just benefit my “career,” but ensured my children would have comfortable lives, despite my years of meager compensation. My father helped to feed, clothe, and house “the least of these.” Sure, they were his grandchildren, but that doesn’t affect the point: If a man doesn’t take care of the members of his own household, he’s worse than an infidel.
And, because his money helped launch me in my vocation, the scope of his generosity is far wider. Obviously, I wouldn’t be alive at all without my father. And most certainly I wouldn’t have the life I have – my educational opportunities, pastoral leadership, the chance to teach undergraduate theology, the priceless freedom to read and write – without his money. People who are blessed by my teaching and writing enjoy the overflow of my father’s blessing. Directly, my father’s skill with money blessed dozens, perhaps a few hundred. Indirectly, my father’s skill with money has blessed thousands.
My father’s money made it possible for me to sit at my desk writing this article about money. When he distributed portions of our inheritance, he had no idea he was using Mammon to make friends with you, the reader of this essay. I trust he has.
