The Unjust Steward: Wealth, Poverty, and the Church Today

The poor ask for medicine and you offer them poison; they beg for bread and you give them a sword; they plead for freedom and you subject them to slavery; they implore to be freed from their bonds and you entrap them in an inescapable net. - Basil of Cesarea One of the most common arguments against “social justice Christianity” is that this prophetic and socially-attuned version of the faith is a relatively recent development, something born out of the World Wars, identity politics, and liberation theologies of the 20th century. Yet this is patently untrue especially when it comes to Christianity’s long history of condemning exploitation of the poor. On usury, the predatory lending of money at exorbitantly high interest rates to the poor, the Old and New Testament and early church fathers such as Basil of Cesarea, John Chrysostom, and Ambrose of Milan make many of today’s most fiery social justice preachers look like kittens.  “You rich,” Basil fairly sneers in his Homily on Psalm 14 .

“What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the faces of the poor into the dirt?” - Isaiah 3:15 In 1996 my grandfather lay dying of skin cancer in his bedroom. I was fourteen years old and seated with my siblings at my grandparents’ kitchen table, trying to grasp the meaning of what was taking place and watching as my aunts, uncles and cousins took turns saying their final goodbyes.  On the one hand, death by cancer was nothing new. Like so many families with migrant farm labor in their immediate past, varieties of cancers seemed to bloom undetected and unchecked until it was far too late. Some of my fondest memories from childhood are the result of long car rides from our home outside San Antonio, TX to the tiny East Texas town of Rosebud -- population less than 2,000 -- where I played wildly with my siblings and cousins outside as my parents, aunts and uncles mourned distant relatives indoors. My experiences of those trips involved climbing trees, running from cows, tasting

" You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close." Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption is in many ways a meditation on proximity. In it, Stevenson, a defense lawyer for people on death row and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, AL, describes what he has learned about the U.S. criminal justice system by getting close to the people he has served, by getting to know their names, stories, and families. In explaining his decision to get close, he speaks about his grandmother, born in the 1880s and the daughter of slaves in Caroline County, VA. He recalls her telling him to stay close. “‘You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close,’ she told me all the time.” Recalling how lost he initially felt at law school, he realized “Proximity to the condemned, to people unfairly judged; that was what guided me back to something that fe