Wealth and Poverty in Christianity

Parable of the Unjust Steward. 2012.  Artist A.N. Mironov [14] It is time to turn to the fascinating Parable of the Unjust Steward (Luke 16.1-13). It's about a rich landowner who suspects his property manager, called a steward, of squandering his wealth. The rich man decides to fire his steward, at which point the steward panics and then ensures his own survival by remitting the debts of his master’s debtors. He does so in order to be welcomed into these debtors’ homes after news of his dismissal becomes widely known. The startling surprise of this parable comes when the landowner appears to undergo a change of heart. Strangely, the steward’s decision to use the landowner’s wealth to remit debts results not in the landowner becoming even angrier but in commendation. To be clear, this is as miraculous as it is absurd. Adding to this, Jesus closes this parable with a teaching that hints at immorality, and which has vexed interpreters for millennia: “And I tell you, make friends for y...

“Against the demon that said to us, ‘Property can, when a person acquires riches, serve the Lord’: No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth (Matt 6:24).” - Evagrius Ponticus In the writings of Evagrius Ponticus (345-399 AD), one finds a man and inner world beset by demons, ones that he carefully observed, categorized, and struggled against over many nights in his monastic cell. The rigorous self-scrutiny and self-revelation that characterize his work would ultimately give birth to a new form of literature: the searching of the soul.1 His intense conflict with demons - including the demon he called Love of Money -  was a major part of this fourth century monks’ struggle for salvation and purity of soul, and Evagrius is credited with crafting the most sophisticated demonology of early Christian monasticism, if not in ancient Christianity as a whole.2 Among Eva...

In Christianity, the earliest historical reference to a collection being taken up occurs in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, written around 50 C.E. This collection is frequently called “the Jerusalem collection” as it was taken up for the benefit of the Jerusalem assembly. Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians are purely practical, and he tells the Corinthians to follow the same instructions he had already given to the Christians in Galatia: “On the first day of every week, each of you is to put aside and save whatever extra you earn, so that collections need not be taken when I come. And when I arrive, I will send any whom you approve with letters to take your gift to Jerusalem. If it seems advisable that I should go also, they will accompany me.”[1] Paul’s terse set of instructions offers a window into the economic network that this international movement of Jesus followers had become.[2] While there is considerable debate about what prompted this collection -- was it really th...