God gave us a clear indication of how He wanted the world to run — in abundance — by how He created the world in the first place. God placed our first parents in a garden of delight. Our natural and instinctive response to this is that the Fall changed all that. The ground is now cursed, life is now difficult, and sinners don’t deserve an even break. It is true that sinners (apart from the grace of God) are not to be entrusted with easy affluence and wealth. The more an idolater has apart from God, the more he has to be idolatrous with, and the more he has to use as a tool in afflicting others.
But there are numerous indications that the cultural mandate was not abrogated by the Fall. Man still had the responsibility to multiply and fill the earth. But because of our sinfulness, that dominion was conducted in wickedness. But even after God destroyed the wicked world with a flood, He still reiterated the cultural mandate in His charge to Noah, who was a new Adam. Sin was not gone, but neither was the cultural mandate.
In a similar way, the establishment of Israel in the land of Canaan follows the same pattern. Canaan is a new Eden, and God has placed His people, saved by grace in the midst of a sinful world, into a place of abundance. This is the theme of Schneider’s next chapter: “The Exodus: Land of Liberation and Delight.” In doing this, Schneider is taking great care to place affluence in its appropriate redemptive/historical context. The first question is what does the nature of the world itself tell us about abundance? It tells us that God is rich and He is good, and abundance is therefore normal. The second question addresses whether or not the presence of sin eradicates this truth entirely, or instead places us under a redemptive discipline so that we can get back to the same place. Schneider argues cogently for the latter. “These texts of the exodus are as near as anything we have in sacred Scripture (except perhaps for Luke’s Gospel) to a theology that is uniquely aimed at the concerns of wealthy people seeking God” (p. 67).
The nagging thought keeps appearing that perhaps Schneider is drifting toward a “name it, claim it, blab it, grab it” understanding of wealth, but he really is not. “Unfortunately, it has mainly been defenders of the so-called Prosperity Gospel who have stressed these narratives of wealth as models for believers in our day. Their readings lack proper nuance, and their applications thus seriously distort the sense of Scripture on how faith relates to affluence” (p. 67). Having said this, Schneider states his thesis bluntly. “That theme of course continues the one that began in Eden, endured to Noah, and grew strong again in the narratives of the patriarchs. It is the promise of God to bring his people quite deliberately into conditions of material prosperity and power in the extreme” (p. 70, emphasis his).
The Exodus and the establishment of God’s people in the land are understood, in the final analysis, within the parameters established clearly in the book of Deuteronomy. Whenever we start talking about serious affluence, it is right and proper for those who have any spiritual sensitivity at all to wonder “where are the brakes on this thing?” The answer is that the brakes are a function of covenantal faithfulness — blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. Schneider argues that the later prophetic witness against the economic sins of Israel were situated in this context. “It means that the prophets understood Israel’s sins in the context of these powerful, creational Deuteronomic terms” (p. 71). This means, incidentally, when we get to Amos and Jeremiah, that the rebukes there are directed at fat cats, and not against wealthy men per se. In Deuteronomy God granted them wealth in order to confirm the covenant (Dt. 8:17-18). All fat cats are wealthy, but not all wealthy men are fat cats. One of the central sins of the envy-ridden left is that they cannot make this distinction. One of the central sins of the greed-ridden right is that they cannot make this distinction. The issue is the covenant, and at the center of the covenant is the word and law of the triune God.
Schneider is not living in a dream castle. This is a new creation, a new garden, and one of the first things we should know to look for when we enter a biblical garden is the serpent. “It seems that material abundance is as dangerous for the freedom that it creates as it is good in its potential for bringing about cosmic good in and through delight. Creation of this kind necessarily makes possible a fall” (p. 73). “The text of Deuteronomy makes it very clear that the good of affluence has certain very serious challenges built into it” (p. 73).
At the same time Schneider considers and rejects the idea that “wealth” back in biblical times was nothing like the “wealth” that we have to deal with, which would mean that we have to turn somewhere else for direction and guidance. “If the concepts involved are so unstable that they cannot cross time, it is hard to see how we could affirm the inspired meaning and authority of the Bible at all” (p. 75).
The last section of this chapter contains his discussion of the jubilee. He argues that the basic principles found in the jubilee are applicable and authoritative for us today — “we should imagine the jubilee as a repetition of the exodus itself, as a re-entry of Israel into the land” (p. 85). And this is a vision with constant room for application because God is engaged in “shaping a ‘race of kings'” (p. 85). “The jubilee is an uncompromising manifesto of delight as the vision of life in the world that God fairly demands” (p. 87). This is all very good, and at the foundation is the care that Schneider takes in discussing what the jubilee law actually required. Rather than weakening property laws, as is commonly thought, the jubilee strengthened them, ensuring that agricultural land was permanently entailed upon the families that came over, as it were, on the Mayflower.