Wealth and Poverty in Christianity

This is a section of a larger chapter on the parable of the unjust steward. The full text is the third chapter of the following text .  In 2010, I found myself presenting on Christian ‘wealth stewardship’ in Spanish. This was in Hendersonville, North Carolina as part of a regularly recurring conference of Latinx Episcopalians, an event conducted almost entirely in Spanish. I was there as a staff member of the Episcopal Church Foundation (ECF), an organization that produces resources to assist with congregational leadership and fundraising, and most of the attendees were clergy and lay leaders of Spanish-speaking congregations. The purpose of my presentation was to make the case for the way the Episcopal Church understands stewardship and raises monies for congregations, the (condescending) theory being that most Latinx Episcopalians were coming from the Roman Catholic tradition and hadn’t been exposed to mainline Protestant congregational fundraising practices such as annual pledge...

A radical transformation in Christianity’s attitude toward wealth and its public role in caring for the poor occurred around 312 CE with Constantine, the Roman empire’s first Christian emperor. Constantine has been described as a paradoxical figure, “an autocrat who never ruled alone; a firm legislator for the Roman family, yet who slew his wife and eldest son and was perhaps, himself, illegitimate; a dynastic puppet-master, who left no clear successor; a soldier whose legacy was far more spiritual than temporal.”[1] Constantine’s conversion and military victories under the banner of the ‘new god’ of the Christians, would result in the development of an imperial Christianity that appears at times to have had little to do with the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. And yet, as I’ll discuss below, one of the through lines was Christianity’s care for the poor, a charism that had until then been primarily practiced within and among Christians but which now became a public responsibil...

Grape gathering from elm trellises in Italy, an 1849 illustration.  " For as a round stone cannot become square unless portions be cut off and cast away, so also those who are rich in this world cannot be useful to the Lord unless their riches be cut down."  The Shepherd of Hermas was one of the most popular and widely-read books in early Christianity. Written during the first half of the second century, The Shepherd was “the most widely read Christian book outside our present biblical canon in the first five centuries of the Church” with more copies discovered in Egypt before the fourth century than any other New Testament book, including even the Gospels of Matthew and John.[1][2][3] The fourth century Codex Sinaiticus included it among the books of the New Testament, and it is spoken of as scripture by theologians such as Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Tertullian.[4] This popular text was composed in Rome over the span of about forty years and includes five v...

In Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years , Diarmaid McCullough describes monasticism’s development in Syria and Egypt as a “silent protest” and “implied criticism of Church’s decision to become a large-scale and inclusive organization.”[1] Monasticism was - and remains - a welcome alternative to and refuge from a monarchical and wealth-obsessed church, a way of life that resolves questions held in uneasy tension: namely, how does one remain faithful to Jesus’ imperative to dispossess one’s self of wealth, while also remaining within a church that had thrown open the doors to the wealthy and powerful?  In the third and fourth centuries, the first Christian ascetic hermits stepped out of society -- literally walking out into the desert in many cases -- and followed Jesus’ advice to abandon worldly wealth. They did so even as they and their emerging communities remained under authority of the bishop and therefore part of the orbit of the wider Church.[2] This meant monasticism ...