Wealth and Poverty

At a time of global financial crisis and multi-million pound pensions, not to mention the chronic disparities of wealth in our own society and across the world, we need to think seriously about what Christianity has to say on wealth and poverty.

There isn’t a single clear position. On the one hand, Christian social concern, through organisations such as Christian Aid, works toward the ending of poverty as a blight on people’s lives. When we put money in the red envelopes, we hope to make poor people wealthier. On the other, wealth is seen as a spiritual danger, a barrier between people and God. You cannot, as Jesus said, serve God and Mammon. ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’ (Lk 18: 25, JB).

But Jesus also (rather obscurely) encouraged his followers to ‘use money, tainted as it is, to win you friends, and thus make sure that when it fails you, they will welcome you into the tents of eternity’ (Lk 16: 9, JB); which suggests at the very least that his disciples were to live in the world as it is, and, to some degree, on the world’s terms. Behind all the argument about wealth and poverty there lies a deeper argument, about whether Christians are to be ‘worldly’ or ‘unworldly’, and what those words should properly mean.

Recent Christian theology has spoken about God’s ‘bias to the poor’. This is not quite the same as a bias toward poverty; but in what follows I set out some arguments around the proposition that Christianity favours poverty, and that wealth is properly regarded as a spiritual danger.

In everything that follows, ‘poverty’ is taken to mean ‘chosen poverty’, not the poverty imposed on people by inadequate material resources or exploitation by others.

POVERTY

• Jesus was poor; it seems that he had no home, and no resources apart from what others gave him. ‘The Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.’ We are called to imitate Christ, in this as in all else.
• Wealth always involves someone else’s deprivation. It is not something that we can enjoy without consequences to others: my cheap shirt is someone else’s waged poverty. Practically all material wealth is based on injustice, and as Christians, we should take no part in that.
• Poverty requires discipline, and a disciplined life is spiritually beneficial. This is one reason why a vow of poverty is part of the vows of most religious orders.
• The world, because of its fallen nature, presents us with the temptations and distractions of material things. Wealth is a giving way to those temptations.
• Poverty is not just about material possessions. It is part of our realisation that we have nothing of ourselves, that we are wholly dependent upon God. Wealth leads us to feel that we can manage without him.

WEALTH

• Poverty and wealth are relative terms. One is poorer than…, wealthier than… It makes little sense to turn them into absolutes. When is one poor enough to satisfy God? When does one become wealthy enough to anger him? These rather absurd questions, of themselves, make it clear that poverty and wealth are not the main issue.
• The good things of the world are genuinely good; they are not the temptations of the devil. ‘Wealth’ means no more than having access to the good things that God has created.
• The cultivation of self-denial, whether materially or emotionally, may lead some to a clearer vision of God, but more often leads to narrowed and impoverished personalities who can do little to serve the spiritual needs of their fellows. Better Friar Tuck than a sadistic nun.
• Wealth can do great good for others, whereas poverty lacks the means (Margaret Thatcher’s reading of the Good Samaritan).
• It is inconsistent to choose poverty for oneself, but to see the enriching of others as a desirable social end.
• Societies, not individuals, determine relative wealth and poverty. We live within the economic possibilities of our society, with the resources that our society has. Even the poorest in Western societies are wealthy compared to the poor of the third world.
• A society of ascetics is almost unimaginable. Individuals might make the choice for poverty; but human societies are bound to live through their available material resources, and will naturally seek to maximise their material possibilities.

THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

How we think about these matters will depend on how we understand the nature of the world and the Christian’s relation to it.

If you suspect creation; if you are inclined to believe that the world is a bad place, and that we should detach ourselves from it to draw closer to God, then you will probably see poverty as a part of what is required of us.

If you see creation as sacramental, as capable of mediating God’s being through objects and events, you will be more ready to embrace material things as part of God’s good creation and as the means of drawing closer to him.

If, regardless of your view of the created world, you feel that human beings tend to avoid God by placing things between themselves and him, then you might feel that, good or bad, we have to clear the things of the world out of the way in order to see God truly.

If you believe that God relates to human beings in a punitive way, you will probably feel that poverty is a way of making yourself acceptable to him by anticipating the discipline that he will impose upon us.

If you believe that God’s attitude to us is generous and fulfilling, and that he desires all good things for us, then you will be less suspicious of the good things of the world. There are even Christian groups that believe that salvation is demonstrated by wealth, because wealth shows God’s favour and approval.

If you believe that fulfilling ourselves is not the point, and that the way to God is the way of the Cross, which involves a self-emptying akin to that of Jesus (Phil 2, 6-8), then chosen poverty will almost certainly be part of that way.

If you believe that being a Christian is primarily a call to an ‘unworldly’ state, you will tend to suspect wealth. If you place more emphasis on the Incarnation, on the realisation of God within the material world, you will be less suspicious of material things.