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The Bible And Money 

The Bible is controversial because people hold very different opinions about what the Bible is. Some people believe that every word of the Bible is literal truth. Some believe that the Bible is a source of moral guidance and compelling stories. Some believe that the Bible is nothing more than ancient superstitions.

Whatever you believe about the Bible, the Bible has shaped attitudes about the meaning of life, human worth, marriage, slavery, war, sex, government, and money, just to name a few topics. Let's pick just one topic that affects all of us in one way or another. What does the Bible teach about money?

As soon as we ask the question, we have to stop and analyze the question itself. No matter what the topic, the biggest problem for any question about "what the Bible teaches" is that the Bible is not really a single book. We think of the Bible as a single book because we can buy it as a single book in the bookstore. But the word "Bible" comes from the Greek word meaning "books." The Bible is a collection of books rather than a single book.

This practical result is that you will have people quoting the Bible to "prove" what "the Bible teaches" about any particular topic. At the same time, you will have people "proving" the opposite because they quote other Bible verses.

The only way to get beyond such contradictory arguments is to recognize that the Bible was not written as a coherent, organized book. Instead, it is a collection of widely divergent material from different historical eras, geographical locations, and originally written in different languages. And the collection itself has been edited and expanded, and then edited some more.

The Bible has many stories about money and wealth, but they come from different economic eras than our own. Many of the earliest stories in the Bible are about nomads, who lived as herders rather than farmers. Other stories were written about people living as farmers in agrarian societies, where wealth was based on control of the land. Money in a capitalist economy is far different from money in societies based on herding or farming. If you consult the Bible to find out "what the Bible teaches about money," you need to be clear about the economic system behind the particular stories.

Yet, despite these widely different economic systems, people will read the Bible as if they are stories written in today's newspaper, as if the economic conditions for nomads or farmers in agrarian societies could apply directly to our own capitalist era.

If you want to know what "the Bible teaches about money," do you take the stories of a nomad, such as Abraham, who amassed great wealth? Do you base your economic life on the words of Jesus, "Blessed are the poor," and believe that God wants you to be poor? Or do you simply get confused with all of the conflicting stories?

At a seminar about creating wealth, I saw a man who was confused about what he thought the Bible teaches about money. I heard him ask the speaker, "How can you say it is good to be rich? Jesus said that a rich man cannot get into heaven"

The problem for the man started with the fact that he had misquoted a story told in the Gospel of Matthew. (The same story is also told in the Gospels of Mark and Luke.) "Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, 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'" (Matthew 19: 23-24.)

The most basic fact that the man did not understand was that Jesus was telling the story in an agrarian society. A rich man was part of the ruling class who controlled the land. Wealth came from exploitation and abuse of the majority of the population.

Jesus was not talking about being rich in a capitalist economy. It is possible to be rich in a capitalistic economy without exploiting others. Yet the man who asked the question assumed that the words of Jesus apply directly to being rich in a capitalist economy. This meant that he really didn't understand the real point of the story.

This is the kind of misunderstanding that happens again and again when people use Bible verses without paying attention to the economic context behind the story. The only real answer to the man who asked the question at the seminar would be to understand the point of the story in an agrarian society.

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