Being Christian in an Affluent Society

Halford Luccock tells of a family called Danks who were devoted to one another and had a happy home. Mr. Danks was a song-writer, which was a very precarious business, and they were poor. But their poverty seemed to draw them closer together. Danks was so impressed with this affection that he wrote a song everybody now knows, “Silver Threads Among the Gold.” The song brought him fame and fortune—but it also brought discord and unhappiness. The home was broken up, and in time Mr. and Mrs. Danks were separated. Some years later he was found dead, kneeling beside his bed in a cheap boarding house in Philadelphia. On the bed beside him lay an old copy of “Silver Threads” with these words written across it: “It is hard to grow old alone” (The Halford Luccock Treasury, p. 417).

Without doubt it is harder to know how to abound than to know how to be abased. As the Scottish proverb has it, “It is more difficult to carry a full cup than an empty one.” And the problem of handling prosperity in a responsible Christian manner has never been more acute than it is in our affluent American society of today. Reinhold Niebuhr puts it pointedly: “How can we get a gas-propelled fur-coated congregation of prosperous Americans to share the uneasy sense over possessions that is so characteristic a note of the New Testament?”

How indeed does a Christian in our modern day learn “how to abound”?

1. By remembering that all abundance, however great, comes from God, the giver of every good and perfect gift. When Joseph Parker, for many years minister of the City Temple in London, was introduced to someone who described himself as “a self-made man,” he is said to have replied, “You lift a great responsibility from the shoulders of the Almighty.” But the fact is that there is no self-made man. For one thing, nature greatly helps to produce the abundance that men enjoy; a scientist has figured that a farmer’s effort amounts to only about 5 per cent of the factors that produce a crop of wheat. Other people, too, and the community in general, help greatly in the production of a man’s wealth. There came to New York City in 1783 a young man named John Jacob Astor, the son of a butcher in Waldorf, Germany. He invested his small capital in furs and traded directly with the Indians, peddling gewgaws and buying their furs at ridiculously low prices. In time he extended this trade to the Pacific Coast, and his ships prospered in the China trade. Undoubtedly he was something of an organizing genius, but it certainly was not by his own efforts alone that the farm he bought in Manhattan for $25,000 increased in value to approximately $500,000,000. It was the growth of the community as a whole that pushed up the value of this property. Edward A. Filene, the great Boston merchant, recognized the truth that the community helps to create abundance when he said: “Why should not I give half my money back to the people? I got it from them.”

Even where a man has contributed significantly to the production of his wealth, it is still God who gave him the power to produce, the ability and opportunity to become prosperous. He has no personal responsibility for this at all. In the truest sense, then, all abundance comes from God.

2. By remembering that, though material prosperity is not unimportant, people and personal relations are infinitely more important for fruitful and happy living.

In Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol the miser, Scrooge, is confronted in a dream by the ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley. During his lifetime Marley, like Scrooge, had been hard and stingy. And now from the realm of the departed the spirit of Marley appears, condemning himself and warning Scrooge against a similar fate. As the ghost of Marley wrings his hands and bemoans his shortcomings, Scrooge tries to console him: “But you were a good man of business, Jacob.” Whereupon Marley’s ghost cries out: “Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business. Charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence were all my business.” Too late Jacob Marley discovered what his real business in life was.

Several years ago the Reader’s Digest carried the story of General Robert E. Wood, who after a distinguished Army career joined the board of Sears, Roebuck and Company in 1924, becoming its president in 1928. Under his guidance Sears grew into the biggest general store in the world, doing an annual sales business of $5 million. Certainly General Wood has been one of America’s most successful businessmen; an industrialist once said that “three of the biggest influences in business are General Motors, General Electric, and General Wood.” But Wood also had a deep concern for people, and particularly the employees of his company. So he developed a profit-sharing plan, under which each employee contributes up to 5 per cent of his annual salary, the company contributes up to 10 per cent of its annual net profit, and the proceeds are divided up among the employees according to their length of service. Since its beginning this scheme has enabled retiring employees to receive $1.2 billion. General Wood says he is “prouder of it than of anything else I ever did in business.”

3. By remembering that life doesn’t last forever, and that eternity knows no abundance except the riches of character and spirit.

Jesus Christ sought to enforce this salutary lesson in two memorable parables, the parable of Lazarus and Dives (Luke 16:19–31) and the parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:16–20). The point of these parables is that no matter how wealthy a man may be in this world’s goods, his riches will confer on him no lasting benefit unless he uses them to help those who are in need. Only as a man takes this lesson seriously to heart will he be able to say with Paul, “I know both how to be abased and how to abound.”

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