The first chapter of Schneider’s book describes the rise of democratic capitalism, a phenonemon that caused the Church to confront something brand new in human history — the rise of mass affluence. The Church had always had to deal with wealth, and with the wealth of wealthy members, and then had to deal with her own wealth as wealthy members divested themselves of the corrupting influence of mammon . . . in order to give it to the Church. These are not ancient issues from long ago and far away — the Roman church recently released a list of seven deadly “social sins,” one of them being wealthy Christians. No word on wealthy Christian churches though.
Schneider shows that the Church has always been grappling with this issue, and he is setting the stage for discussion of the new world we have entered, one which changes all the questions around. First, he refers to a number of representative figures who (because they are orthodox on the central point) do not condemn material goods as such, but who go on to say that in this fallen world, to consume anything beyond the basic necessities is a form of theft. He cites Augustine on the point, and I can add my own testimony that this sentiment is alive and well in the Church. Growing up in evangelical circles I have heard countless statements made that assume wealth to be a zero-sum game — that is, that I can only have more if someone else has less, and that I as a Christian therefore have a responsibility to try to get by with less. I remember reading Charles Finney once, who argued that drinking tea was a sin because the money could be given to missions.
Now there are circumstances where this is quite true, and Schneider argues that post-apostolic ethical theory (on the question of wealth) in the Church was formed during times when this assertion was quite plausible. And a central theme of this chapter is that it is not plausible any more.
Let me illustrate this principle of “one man’s good at the expense of others.” Suppose there are three men on a life raft, and one of them swam to the boat with a sack full of provisions — food, water, medical supplies — and let us suppose further that they were all his personal property, bought and paid for by him, fair and square. He would still not have the right as a Christian to assert his personal stake in that property and decline to share any of it with the others. The Golden Rule would apply and would apply in spades. For him to eat all the food and drink all the water (he also had a revolver in the sack) meant necessarily that the others would starve. This really would be a zero-sum game. More for him is less for others, and this would mean that the circumstances required “share and share alike.”
And so he shares all his stuff, which is what he ought to do, and they eventually come to land on a lush island, one teeming with game, and which has bananas and coconuts like nobody’s business. Let us say that he is really industrious and after a year there, his hut is bigger and nicer, his possessions greater, his stash of provisions greater, and so on. Is his obligation to share the same as it was when they were in the boat? No and yes. No, he does not have to give away his food, straight across. But his neighbors are still his neighbors, and so, yes, he has an obligation to love them — which in this case means teaching them the gospel, and how to live like Christians, which includes the duty of hard work, which will enable them, over the long haul, to build their own big hut.
The Church has frequently responded to the pressures of Gnostic influence by running it through the filters once or twice, removing the grosser elements, and then giving way to a lesser form of it. That is what the Church did, for example, on sexual matters. The Church was adamant (and good for her) that sexual relations were not evil per se when considered as part of God’s creation, but then nevertheless many centuries of Christian ethical teaching went on to record their suspicions about sexual relations, placing restrictions and caveats in every direction. They did not surrender to the Gnostics outright, but they were suspicious where the Gnostics told them to be. The parallel with material possessions is almost exact, and I believe proceeds from the same impulse. The Church has not condemned the good of material possession per se, and is therefore not Gnostic. But the suspicions about material possessions always crowd around as soon as the subject comes up — from Augustine to Finney, to Hauerwas and Sider, to the most recent fund-raising appeal for the relief of third-world poverty that appealed to your guilt for having so much.
But in recent years, an additional factor has entered the discussions. Going back to our lifeboat illustration, suppose that one of the men swam to the boat with all the provisions, but then another man stole it from him — and then consumed it all. In this scenario, the theft is actual theft, not theft because there was a refusal to share when it was obviously called for. Now many critics of the emerging global economic system assert that this is precisely what is happening — that other nations are deliberately impoverished, with millions slaughtered, in order that we might have cheap coffee and bananas. We live down at the other end of the lifeboat, and we shield our delicate eyes, so that we might have plausible deniability.
In other words, it is asserted that the injustice of our economic arrangements is not simply unjust in some non-Golden-Rule way, but that it is flagrantly unjust, and that our wealth is a straightforward function of a thuggish foreign policy. First, let it be said that if this were happening, it would be terrible and Christians should be the first to condemn it. If we send in the Marines to fetch our cheap coffee, and we leave the country we got it from a smoking ruin behind us, then who could be for that?
My response to such accusations is that I generally don’t believe them. But it is important to note that my lack of faith is not because I hold that empires are incapable of tawdry behavior. The British Empire disgraced itself with its Boer War, and the United States has done the same kind of thing, and more than once. So that is not the issue. Where it happens, we need an Ambrose to rebuke the emperor. I hope that I would support such a courageous churchman. I hope that I could be such a courageous churchman.
My lack of faith in these contemporary “Michael-Moore-style” accusations is based on three observations. First, those who make these accusations are almost universally in favor of domestic outrages, like our legalized abortion carnage or sodomite marriages. They can’t read the big E on the ethical eye chart, and so why should I ask them to have a try at the bottom line? I believe they are ethical fools, and I don’t trust their moral judgments (Is. 5:20).
Second, they demonstrate in numerous ways that they don’t understand basic economics. Their heart is in charge of their head, and, for example, if minimum wage laws make them feel good in their heart, then they will opt for the feel good move every time. Never mind that minimum wage laws price the poorest of the poor out of the market. They would rather feel good about legislation than to actually do good for poor people. This is because they are sentimentalists, and feeling always trumps doing.
And third, they do not teach the “rich in this present world” to do what the Bible expressly teaches the rich to do. Their solutions are ad hoc, and wander away from the text at the first opportunity.