Do not charge a fellow Israelite interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest. Deuteronomy 23:19
“How much is enough? Is “enough” less than “all you can”? In a time of mobile capital and the technological capacity to accumulate endlessly, “all you can” has no limit or restraint. Work may become a passion and an end in itself, so that accumulation of wealth becomes an addiction that expels the human dimensions of our lives.
On the one hand, is payment for honest, productive work different from investment income, contradicting the old TV ad about “making money the old-fashioned way,” which meant managing one’s investments wisely? It is an illusion to think that investment income is “earned” or that it entails work.
Roland Boer points out that in the ancient world those who lived on surplus wealth were in fact “nonproducers”: “The system of estates sought to deal with a very practical matter: how does one feed and clothe the nonproducers? Or rather, how does one enable the nonproducing ruling class to maintain the life to which its members had quickly become accustomed? Directly or indirectly (via tenure), managed estates were the answer.”
Of course it is not different in our world, in which the “nonproducing ruling class” depends on the (poorly paid) work of others. We are wont, in our society, to regard the indigent and unemployed as the “nonproducers” when in fact the “nonproducers” include those who rely on surplus wealth and investment income for which “earning” is a misguided misnomer.
On the other hand, what of those who lack earning power? The Protestant work ethic has pertained primarily to white males in our society as the ones who by work gained the virtue of wealth and success. But of course most such high earners, from the outset, had unacknowledged advantages. What of racial or ethnic minorities, women, the disabled, and especially those who carry the legacy of enslavement who never gain access to well-paid honest work? Our society has done almost nothing to guarantee or ensure just earning for so many.
And for so many disinherited by our economy, their work is not adequately rewarded, so that honest work is not rightly well paid, rendering a viable life impossible. Conversely the well-connected high earners protect their edge through tax arrangements, legacy education, and other advantages that are denied those willfully left behind in our economy.
The work of mature materiality concerning “earn all you can” is to expose in critical ways the privatized, individualized notion of earning so that earners can begin to see themselves situated in a community of earners, some of whom enjoy huge advantage, some of whom are denied access, and all of whom are skewed by the pernicious norm of privatized wealth. When earning is set within community, earning power, its expectations, its promise, and its restraints may take on a very different texture.”
Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 22-24.
I am safely in Hyderabad, India. Notice how Brueggemann addresses the broken patterns of modern life that most people, even Christians, participate in and even promote.
The “earning” of money by the wealthy through charging interest runs directly against how God wanted his people to live in the Old Testament Law. The Bible calls it usury. We can find no support for using money to make more money in Scripture. Why? Using Boer’s word, it turns stewards into nonproducers.
Perhaps one of my top ten most memorable posts out of more than 5,000 would be “C.S. Lewis: Usury or Generosity. Find it here. Ironically, obedience to Jesus delivers us from usury.
When we store up treasures in heaven and live on a mina (3 months income), we actually do not need to participate in interest system. We don’t worry about market fluctuations.
If we save for purchases to pay cash and avoid debt, we amass capital. Rather than investing to get a return, we can invest it for kingdom impact and common good. We can put the money in kingdom impact funds where the money is used to do things like build churches, employ marginalized workers, or other productive things.
There are ways to navigate materiality in alignment with our Christian faith. The key, so far as I read this book, may be to question everything related to money in modern society.
Imagine if instead of trying to make the broken system work to our advantage and then give some money to God, we lived according to the system He outlines for us in Scripture?