Augustine’s Financial Advice

Faith and Wealth: A History of Early Christian Ideas on the Origin, Significance, and Use of Money, by Justo L. González (HarperCollins, 240 pp., $19.95, paper). Reviewed by Arthur Boers, who is pastor of Windsor (Ont.) Mennonite Fellowship and the author of On Earth as It Is in Heaven (Herald).

Some believe liberation theology and the Roman Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter on the economy reflect a faddish twentieth-century obsession with economics. But in Faith and Wealth, Justo González shows that this concern is merely an extension of an ancient, even biblical, preoccupation.

Examining the writings from the church’s first four centuries, González finds a consistent concern about the relationship between faith and wealth, a concern that has been largely ignored by historians and thologians alike, including González himself. The author has impressive historical credentials, having authored the two-volume Story of Christianity and the three-volume A History of Christian Thought. In 30 years of studying the early church, however, he focused on traditional doctrines and never noticed the material regarding wealth and its uses. But when he finally did focus on such matters, he found a number of consistent themes.

Such prominent leaders as Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian, the Desert Fathers, John Chrysostom, and Augustine all believed that faith and wealth were not separate issues but crucial pastoral, theological, and ecclesial concerns. “From the earliest time economics was a theological issue, and still is.”

While some conclude that the communal experimentation of the Jerusalem church in Acts failed, González argues that voluntary sharing (or koinōnia) continued for centuries. The church did not celebrate communalism or renunciation per se; rather, sharing was commended on the basis of the needs of others.

Other common themes worked their way through the early centuries. Usury, making loans and collecting interest, was universally condemned. (Today, only a few brave organizations, such as Habitat for Humanity, dare to live up to this former norm.) The Bible’s reversal of values was often cited, calling the rich poor in both virtue and joy. There were many reminders that the wealthy have a harder time entering the kingdom. Almsgiving was continually commended. All agreed that wealth was to be shared, not accumulated.

The development of monasticism served to promote voluntary poverty and common treasuries. Intriguingly, González notes that the Reformation’s rejection of monasticism also quashed “monasticism’s reminder to the entire church of the need for obedience in economic matters.” There were a variety of factors, but to “an age of burgeoning private wealth through trade and industrial development, the monastic … life was a painful reminder of values and traditions that were no longer cherished.”

Evangelicals are taking the church fathers more seriously, and so this book is especially helpful. González argues that “we must no longer ignore the witness of earlier Christians.… They lived in a world in which contrasts between the rich and the poor were staggering; we live in a world populated by a few who have millions and millions who have nothing. For them, these issues were indissolubly connected with … salvation. Has the world changed so much that what they had to say is no longer relevant? I believe not. Has our commitment waned to such an extent that we can no longer take seriously the questions they pose to our use of the world’s resources? I hope not.”

I survived Watergate. I’ve fought off media vultures and spoken in prisons simmering from inmate riots; I’ve rebutted questions from everyone from Geraldo Rivera to Mike Wallace. So I should be prepared for anything. But when I was invited to speak on ethics at Harvard Business School, I was, I confess, apprehensive.

Harvard had heard my criticisms of the school’s $20 million endowment for a chair in ethics. I had described the program as “futile,” since the university steadfastly disavows the basis for ethics—absolute values.

Now they were giving me the chance to make my case in the hallowed halls of Harvard. My suggested topic was “Why Good People Do Bad Things.” Harvard wanted me to explain how someone like Chuck Colson—ivy-league educated, a successful lawyer, and all that—could have committed Watergate-era crimes.

Well, I had suggested to Harvard that the more appropriate title might be “Why Bad People Do Good Things.” I planned to talk about people’s disposition to do evil unless restrained by the grace of God. I planned to say that their ethical studies were, at best, pure pragmatism: Good ethics is good business. And at that, I figured, the students would rise up and throw tomatoes, condoms, calculators, lap-top computers—whatever might be handy.

After all, I had read about what happened to Sir John Eccles. A few years ago, the Nobel prize-winning neurobiologist told Harvard students that he could account for the formation of the human brain by evolution, but he could not account for the consciousness of the mind except for divine power. The students had hissed him unmercifully.

Silent Scribbling

I had done my homework. I had read Harvard President Derek Bok’s speeches and studied Harvard’s course material. I had read books on ethics and refreshed myself on Enlightenment philosophy.

When I arrived at Harvard, I discovered I had been assigned one of the largest lecture halls. It was packed; students were sitting in the aisles and standing against the wall at the rear.

I said a quick prayer and began, hoping to score a few points before the hissing began.

I challenged the wisdom of the Socratic method employed at Harvard—the notion that through open inquiry each individual can arrive at his or her own truth. That’s all well and good, I said, but you can’t learn ethics that way. Ethos, the Greek root of the word ethics, means a stable, a resting place of refuge. Ethos is unchanging, unlike morality; morals derives from the word mores, meaning behavior. Ethics is what is right; morality is what people do. Our culture confuses the two.

At this, I expected some reaction. But no, the students were busily scribbling into their notebooks.

So I ventured further. Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century philosopher, had argued that, using moral reason, people can deduce the right conclusions from a priori moral principles. In other words, we only need to be rational in order to do the right thing.

Then I talked about my life: a fine education, honors in law school, at age 39 an aide to the President of the United States. When I got to the White House, I put all my money in a blind trust, certain that I could not be bought, and committed to not doing anything wrong.

But I ended up going to jail.

Still, the students continued to scribble. Odd, I thought—the Stepford Wives come to Harvard.

I talked about physical laws: known laws in nature produce known physical consequences. It is the same in the spiritual world: violating moral laws produces predictable moral consequences.

Still not a murmur.

So I talked about my experience with Jesus Christ, how God changes not just one’s mind but, more important, one’s will. The transcendent truth is the only basis for ethics—and they weren’t getting that at Harvard.

But they just kept writing.

When I finished, there was polite applause. No one seemed to notice or mind that I had just told them that their $25,000 education wasn’t giving them what they needed most.

But surely the hard stuff would come in the question period. After all, college students like nothing better than to show off how much they know (or don’t know, as is sometimes the case).

But the questions were marshmallows. Not a single student challenged my thesis. If one had, I could have engaged in healthy debate. I was prepared for their passion, but their passivity was unnerving.

Spectators On The Brink

Why was there no response? Maybe they were all just being nice. Or perhaps everyone was won over by the force of my arguments. But I don’t think so.

No, the answer seemed to lie in one Christian student’s analysis: “They simply didn’t know the right questions to ask.” The issues I had raised were so foreign that these students didn’t even have the tools to debate—namely, the language to engage in moral discourse.

That is the most worrisome conclusion. A debate would have meant they would fight for their convictions; silence meant they had none.

The late Francis Schaeffer used to say that while we lived in a post-Christian era, there was at least an “echo” of Christian truth. People still had some vestige of knowledge of absolutes. Thus, on the explosive campuses of the sixties, even though students were hostile to Christianity, at least they were asking the right questions about the nature of human life.

But at Harvard, they weren’t even asking questions. They simply scribbled in their notebooks, glassy-eyed. It seemed they were there simply to mark their time and move on, looking forward to sushi and BMWs, co-ops in Manhattan and number-crunching on Wall Street. Don’t trouble us with anything further.

But I was troubled. For those earnest, bland note-takers are going to be some of our next savings-and-loan officials, CEOs of major corporations, senators, and legislators. And they are oblivious to the ethical foundation crumbling beneath them.

A free cassette tape of Mr. Colson’s address at Harvard Business School is available from Prison Fellowship, P. O. Box 17500, Washington, D.C. 20041–0500.

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