Yesterday I recorded a series of short interviews that will be aired on the Moody broadcasting network sometime in the next few weeks. We were talking about the imminent release of Is Christianity Good for the World? and in that context the impact of the Christian faith on culture came up. In the course of …
Ananias and Sapphira Must Have Been Liberals
One of the constant refrains that provide the background noise to our contemporary political debates is the idea, oft repeated, that liberals are open-hearted, generous, ready to share, while conservatives are pinched souls, close-fisted, and skinflinty. The problem is that we have a lot of data on this, and the data shows, in remarkably broad …
Think Globally, Sit On Your Butt Locally
I am preaching through the book of Amos, and so issues of economics, finances, generosity, and so on keep coming up. This last Sunday, someone after the service asked about something they had heard, which was that Catholic charities outgive evangelical charities, and do so by a long shot. This had application to Amos, but …
Wonder Goose
The last chapter of Schneider’s book was really interesting, and in his epilogue, where he summarized the work of the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, he really got my attention. De Soto’s book The Mystery of Capital sounded really intriguing so I made a point of ordering it. Besides, he’s a South American writing on …
A Socialist Tricycle
Schneider’s seventh chapter concentrates on four “parables of affluence,” taken from the gospel of Luke. In doing this he is tackling the central challenge to his thesis, and he is taking it head on. “All the Gospels agree that a great deal of Jesus’ teaching was on the subject of wealth, and that most of …
The Font of Lasting Generosity
Schneider’s next chapter undertakes the very important task of reconciling two disparate strands of teaching in the gospels. He does well with this task too. First we find the well-known demands of an all-or-nothing discipleship. “In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke …
Jesus and Halliburton
I enjoyed Schneider’s next chapter, but don’t have a lot to say about it. That is probably because he is interacting with the claim of “radical Christianity” that Jesus completely identified with the poor in His Incarnation, a claim that I tend to take less seriously than Schneider does. To insist that Christ was impoverished …
A Layer of Pea Gravel
John Schneider continues his good work in chapter four, and reminds me of another book I am currently reading (and which I would recommend), which is Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth. She says that when evangelicals begin their presentation of the gospel with the fact and reality of sin, they are presenting the gospel out of …
Fat Cats and the Wealthy
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 …
A Package of Oreos and a Gallon of Milk
This next chapter of Schneider’s book was really good. When I perform weddings I routinely resort to the book of Genesis, the book of beginnings. In the first pages of Genesis, before the Fall, God tells us He created us male and female, and after the Fall, Jesus still appeals to that creation order when …