Those of us who live in affluent circumstances accept our duty to develop a simple lifestyle in order to contribute more generously to both relief and evangelism.” This concluding sentence of article nine of the Lausanne Covenant has often been quoted since 1974. The time has come to think about its implementation.
North America is affluent. In a world of hunger, we live with an abundance of food. Restaurants everywhere boast of the “generous portions” they offer and indeed deliver. We eat too much. And we throw away too much food. The opulence of our meals is matched by the extravagance of other expenditures.
The theme of a simple lifestyle leads to the more basic question of how we use our possessions. For centuries we have been subject to much false teaching concerning wealth. Since the Reformation there has been a distinct move, seldom observed, to the morality of the Book of Proverbs with its praise of possessions, rather than that of the New Testament. In addition, some mechanism of thought in the Calvinist tradition seemed to say that material riches were the indicator of God’s blessings.
Worse still, the last three hundred years in the West witnessed the victory of the Roman Law concept of property, which is highly individualistic and adjudges the owner the right to dispose of his possessions to the exclusion of any outside consideration and to the extent of the destruction of the property. This philosophy of property paved the way for the horrors of early capitalism, and it still determined the alternative given by Karl Marx: the replacement of the obviously inhuman individualistic concept by a more human collectivist one.
The fathers of the early church, however, understood and proclaimed that the Roman Law concept of “dominion” could not be reconciled with the Christian idea of stewardship. St. Basil told the church that, beyond an appropriate satisfaction of personal needs, all material means were to serve the poor. Even the famous slogan, “Private property is theft” has not been thought up by some radical socialist of the nineteenth century, but belongs to St. Chrysostom, the greatest preacher of Christian antiquity. Perhaps he thought of Christ’s parable of the talents when he addressed the well-to-do, saying: “God has invested capital with you. It is not your property, but a loan by him, made to give you opportunity to exercise mercy on those who are in need.” Any surplus means, any idle capital that is not used to relieve the burden of the needy, is similar to stolen goods. For Christians, then, there can only be functional property, possessions serving the purposes of sustainment and other purposes as set by God.
The question of possessions is the question of how we spend or retain them. Affluent Christians need to go back to the biblical tradition of stewardship and bid farewell to the Roman Law concept of property.
Today the other aspect of the question seems to be even more important: the question of how we earn our possessions. The Old Testament prophets made very clear that not any kind of “increase” is a gift of God. Among those who make large fortunes in a short time there are always some who display personal asceticism or even become public benefactors. But beneficence does not cover up the inordinate ways with which some people may have extracted the money from the public in the first place, using situations of virtual monopoly and taking advantage of the so-called law of supply and demand instead of giving a just wage and asking the just price.
But this is not only a moral problem for business tycoons. On all levels of our society, a zest for acquisition reigns, a determined quest for self-enrichment that goes far beyond what the fathers of the ancient church dealt with. Our society is governed not just by a love of possessions but by a single-mindedness to increase them, which would befit the pursuit of the kingdom. The manner with which we accumulate possessions will certainly come under the scrutiny of the eternal, just as much as the manner with which we dispose of them. The New Testament speaks of honest work by which we are to earn our keep and the means with which to support the needy.
One of the strangest sights in North America is the peaceful coexistence of wealth and religion, or rather the enthusiastic efforts of many to marry the two. Spending and making money is furnished with religious camouflage. Some Christians will wear expensive suits to demonstrate how they have been blessed. Others think their pastor should drive a costly car—presumably as witnessing to the might of God, whereas it should rather be seen as worship of the gods of success.
Worse is the way some Christian agencies lure our sense of avarice as in the newspaper ad I saw last week of a church-sponsored card game drive, inviting people to “come as you are after church” and “win cash” up to a thousand dollars.
In an affluent society like ours the temptations and the attempts to compromise will naturally lie in the field of pursuit of possessions. But we should be reminded that Jesus declared this field to be the most dangerous altogether, irrespective of one’s situation. Where we are busy to wed religion and money, he stated the sharpest antithesis: You cannot serve God and Mammon together.
Poverty may be painful, but wealth and its pursuit is deadly dangerous. Where greed rules, gratefulness for forgiveness received and love of God no longer take first place. Property tends to be a consuming matter, excluding the interests of God’s kingdom. Our relationship to our possessions, then, is the expression of what we are truly living for.
