Money Talk in the Church
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Somewhat haphazardly the Church has always had to talk about money. It has talked about money because of its ongoing concern for “stewardship” and the church budget. Now however, it is clear that the church’s talk about money cannot be confined to its own finances, but must concern the economy with its endless propensity for injustice and inequality, e.g., regressive taxation, high interest rates, and low wages. The reason the church has to talk about the economy is because there is almost no one left to think and talk critically about the economy because of the dominance of capitalist ideology and its capacity to domesticate almost every voice. What follows here is a consideration of some of the biblical texts to which we may appeal in our “money talk,” while we recognize that all such talk in the church is hazardous and risky. Most specifically, we need to talk about the toxic power of debt, and to do so in many congregations that are occupied by vigilant creditors who benefit from the perennially indebted.
It occurs to me that we may find in the Bible two quite different ways of talking about money concerning which we need to have clarity. One way to talk about money in the Bible is to think of economic transactions in an individualistic way, as simple exchanges that take place between two parties or persons, often a creditor and a debtor. This view, featured especially in the Book of Proverbs, understands the use of money in the following way with an accent on individual responsibility and freedom:
Having money requires hard work:
A slack hand causes poverty,
but the hand of the diligent makes rich (Proverbs 10:4).
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest,
and poverty will come upon you like a robber,
and want, like an armed warrior (24:33-34).
Greed that oppresses the vulnerable is destructive:
Oppressing the poor in order to enrich oneself,
and giving to the rich, will lead only to loss (22:16).
Do not rob the poor because they are poor,
or crush the afflicted at the gate;
for the Lord pleads their cause
and despoils of life those who despoil them (22:22-23).
Debt must be avoided:
It is senseless to give a pledge,
to become surety for a neighbor (17:18).
The rich rules over the poor,
and the borrower is the slave of the lender (22:7).
Generosity toward the needy is commended:
Those who despise their neighbors are sinners,
but happy are those who are kind to the poor (14:21).
Whoever gives to the poor will lack nothing,
but one who turns a blind eye will get many a curse (28:27).
All of these maxims assume that economics is the simple practice of unencumbered individuals who may take responsibility for their future. The downside of this teaching is the assumption that failure in the economy is a sign of individual failure, perhaps laziness or foolishness or carelessness.
This way of talking about money is widely held by unthinking church members and by the wider US public. This view was given clear, harsh expression by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his famous essay, Self-Reliance:
Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan and the sons of genius fear and hate…is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most.
[Emerson judged that] the cessation of profit, rent, and interest would make all men idle and immoral. [Most of the poor] have made themselves so, [and under socialism would] prove a burden on the state.
Such a self-congratulatory tone reflects a naiveté that makes critical reflection on money exceedingly difficult.
An alternative view of money in systemic terms is much more fully explored in scripture. In this view, there is recognition of the complexity of the economy and the way in which the power of money operates well beyond the simplicity of individual claims and practices. We may take the narrative of Genesis 47:13-26 as a forceful articulation of a sophisticated understanding of money. (It is a text that is never read aloud in church.) In the narrative, Joseph, beloved son of Jacob, has become the money-man for Pharaoh who is himself an embodiment and symbol of coercive economic dominance in his realm. In this narrative Pharaoh has a monopoly on grain, as he has stored his surplus grain in the storage cities built by Israelite slave labor (Exodus 1:11). There is, to be sure, some high irony in the recognition that the storehouse cities that gave Pharaoh a monopoly were built by slave labor. (See James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017), as he explores the way in which grain was the most likely instrument in the ancient world for accumulation of wealth and power.) Amid the food shortage of the famine, Joseph, on behalf of Pharaoh, traded royal grain for the money of the subsistence peasants (v. 14). When the money of the peasants was gone, Joseph, on behalf of Pharaoh, traded royal grain for the livestock of the peasants, their means of production (vv. 16-17). When their money and their livestock (means of production) had been seized and the famine continued, Joseph, on behalf of Pharaoh, traded royal grain for their land and their bodies, and made them willing slaves of the state economy (vv. 19, 25). In the end, Pharaoh, through Joseph’s mechanisms, had occupied the land and created a system of debt-slaves of those so vulnerable that they could not resist the force of Pharaoh’s economic power. The narrative is one of the slow, deliberate process of the reduction of the economically vulnerable to a state of dependency and, therefore, economic slavery. This systemic view of the economy makes clear how innocent (and irrelevant) the simplistic teaching on money in the Book of Proverbs is that fails to reckon with the measure of coercive force that comes with disproportionate wealth.
It is an elemental work of ministry, in my judgment, to help people move from an innocent individualistic account of money to one that reckons with the systemic force of wealth, the core of which is recurringly to reduce the vulnerable to dependence and finally to servile status. Both views of money are to be found in scripture. That simply means that many different interests had a part in making the tradition. But it is the systemic view of money in Genesis 47 that more fully relates to our current economic reality in which the political force of money generates much of our public life, policy, and practice. Pharaoh fully understood how to exercise that force!
A systemic view of money—variously articulated by the prophets of Israel in their defense of the poor and vulnerable—produced an economy of haves and have-nots, and consigned many subsistence peasants to a life of poverty and vulnerability. The makers of the Israelite tradition saw this well and clearly. The decisive response to this systemic management of an economy that preyed upon the vulnerable is the articulation of the “Year of Release” in Deuteronomy 15:1-18 and the “Year of Jubilee” in Leviticus 25. The Torah provision for a Year of Release provided that every seven years debts must be cancelled and property returned to its rightful owner, in order to prevent the formation of a permanent economic underclass in Israel, for such a class would be profoundly inimical to the notion of a covenantal neighborhood. The Torah teaching on the Year of Release, in the mouth of Moses, features five “absolute infinitives,” a grammatical device in Hebrew wherein the verb is reiterated for the purpose of emphasis. The five absolutes infinitives (that are recognized in English translation) are:
really hear (v. 7),
really open (v. 8),
willingly lend (v. 8),
give liberally (v. 10), and
really open (V.11).
The five usages (that occur more than anywhere else in scripture), taken together, underscore the absolute urgency of the practice of debt cancellation. This practice is indeed the antidote to the predatory inclination of the economy. Thus the Torah proposes disrupting conventional economics in the interest of nurturing a neighborhood for the economically encumbered. The juxtaposition of predation in Genesis 47 and the provision for release in Deuteronomy 15 instruct us in all that we need to know for a critical understanding of our economy. The narrative of predation submerges individual persons into the systemic flow of money; the provision for release, to the contrary, values the vulnerable neighbor enough to resist the force of endless predation.
We may add as suggestive footnotes three textual citations that bespeak a caution to systemic greed:
1. In I Samuel 22:2, David mounts his vigorous campaign against the kingship of Saul. It is reported:
Everyone who was in distress,
and everyone who was in debt,
and everyone who was discontented
gathered to him; and he became captain over them.
The triad that characterizes his followers consists of those in distress, in debt, and discontented, those suffering most from present public arrangements. The triad suggests that the company of David consisted in those who are especially vulnerable and therefore prepared for a major social upheaval that David would evoke. The narrative makes no connection to the “Year of Release,” but we may conclude that David and his company would have had a practical view of redress of economic exploitation, and so supported the new movement. As David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), has noted, all such upheavals include, first of all, an effort to burn the tax and bank records that keep vulnerable folk in hock. Such likely are the partisans of David.
2. The Elisha narratives in II Kings are deeply subversive of established order. (See Brueggemann, Testimony to Otherwise).
In II Kings 4:1-7, we have a narrative concerning a widow woman without resources, who lacked a male advocate in a patriarchal society, and who is at the mercy of predatory creditors (v. 1). In the narrative Elisha responds to the widow’s crisis. He enables the widow woman to resist the predation by an act that lacks explanation and defies any normal economic reckoning:
He said, “Go outside, borrow vessels from all your neighbors, empty vessels and not just a few. Then go in, and shut the door behind you and your children, and start pouring into all these vessels; when each is full, set it aside.” So she left him and shut the door behind her and her children; they kept bringing vessels to her, and she kept pouring. When the vessels were full, she said to her son, “Bring me another vessel.” But he said to her, “There are no more” (II Kings 4:3-6).
The prophet worked an inexplicable abundance for the hapless woman who lacked resources. Her abundance was a prophetic defiance of the economy of parsimony. The narrative concludes as the prophet instructs the widow:
Go sell the oil and pay your debts, and you and your children can live on the rest (v. 7).
Elisha knew her debts had to be paid. But his provision for her went well beyond her debt. The narrative attests an inexplicable abundance wrought by the prophet that makes the unbearable parsimony of the credit-debt system to be an irrelevance.
3. Nehemiah 10:28-39 constitutes a summary of the covenant into which Ezra led Israel in the re-formation of the community of Judaism.
The summary offers a number of provisions concerning money and offerings, suggesting that the covenant pertains to the specific monetary practices of the community. Our interest is in the singular notation in 10:31:
We will forego the crops of the seventh year and the exaction of every debt.
Alongside the provision for Sabbath is the mention of a seventh year of debt relief. There is no explanatory account for this provision; but quite clearly this passing note alludes back to the Torah provision of Deuteronomy 15. The notation is an acknowledgment that the economic perspective of the newly formed covenant community was grounded in debt relief that defied “ordinary economics.”
Thus we may conclude that while the actual implementation of the “Year of Release” in ancient Israel is difficult and obscure, there is no doubt that covenantal teaching about the economy refused to accept the ordinary predatory practices of the Pharonic economy that was replicated among the “Canaanites.” This provision is richly evident in the exegetical tradition, as Israel knew that the Lord of the economy does not intend to have the life of the human community reduced to a contest between greedy creditors and helpless debtors. This prospect of relief from the predatory system is elemental to Israel’s self-understanding.
It is too far afield from my competence to comment fully on the matter of debt and debt cancellation as the theme operates in the New Testament. But two comments seem especially pertinent.
First, we all know that debt forgiveness is pivotal to the “Lord’s Prayer.” Thus we pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). (The alternative conventional reading as “trespasses” does not change anything in the petition.) Sharon Ringe, Jesus, Liberation, and the Biblical Jubilee (1985) has shown how this provision and the entire prayer more generally pertain to the Jubilee practice of debt cancellation and restoration to a viable neighborly community. The hard matter of money has been there in our defining prayer from the outset, so we have mumbled and managed to explain away the topic in our long-term effort to keep Jesus safely remote from our economic existence. No doubt the Torah provision of Moses rings in the ears of Jesus!
Second, the parable of the “Unforgiving Servant” sounds the same note (Matthew 18:23-34). In the parable the king cancels the debt of his desperate servant. That servant in turn, however, refuses to forgive a lesser debt for a fellow slave. The parable jarringly contrasts the generous forgiveness of the king and the pernicious insistence of the slave.
It is unmistakable that the Torah designation of covenantal economics persists in the narrative reflection of the New Testament. It remains for the church to recover this awareness about the economy in our tradition, and to recover the courage necessary to contest the predatory practices of our economy that have become normative in our society. In sum, scripture is an attestation to an alternative economy of generosity that is wise and knowing about the system and force of predation. It will not do for church folk to remain “innocent” about this truth-telling in scripture.
If all of that were not enough, we may notice that David Graeber, in his remarkable book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, draws the conclusion that the only way out of the morass of debt among us is the practice of Jubilee and debt cancellation. Graeber evinces no interest in matters scriptural or theological, but finally is pressed by economic reality to the most elemental and most insistent teaching of the Torah. Let the church understand! The church has to talk in daring and compelling ways about money!
Walter Brueggemann
March 6, 2023
