This WWW publication of Weep, you rich! is authorised by Rev. Stewart Lane. All rights reserved. The full copyright of this publication remains with the author. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, except for non-profit purposes, provided it carries full reference to its origin.
Stefan U Hegner, March 1997
This book is dedicated to the people of Malawi, who have taught me so much about life and the living of it.
All quotations from scripture are from either The Jerusalem Bible or The New International Version. Readers should note that I have used quotations from the books of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus - both part of the deuterocanonical writings (The Apocrypha).
I am very much indebted to the many friends who have read portions of the book and given me the benefits of their criticisms, comments and creative ideas, especially Dr Jonathon Newell, Rev'd Rendall Day, Paul Masache and Garton & Elizabeth Kamchedzera.
Mtendere and John are married with two children. John has a degree from Chancellor College; Mtendere did her secretarial training at The Polytechnic. Three years ago, John was transferred to Mzuzu. Mtendere, who has a very good job as a secretary to a general manager stayed in Blantyre with the children.
Peter, a keen Christian, has a degree in accountancy from The Polytechnic. When he graduated he was offered a chance to work with a Christian organisation which he would have liked to take up, but he decided instead to take a higher-paying job with a commercial firm.
Madalitso was ordained in l985 after finishing at Zomba Theological College. After a few years as a pastor, he became a treasurer at the church headquarters, where he embezzled K6,000. When it was discovered, he was sacked, de-frocked, and escaped criminal charges only because his family paid the church back the money.
Zaccheus was not selected when he left school, so returned home kungokhala (unemployed) for two years. After that he went to South Africa with a suitcase full of chamba (Marihuana) and brought back a very old and decrepit car. Since then, he has become a thief to get the cash needed to keep the car on the road.
Mercy is a secretary in a large statutory body in Blantyre. She was married, but left her husband and lives alone in her flat where she entertains her boss and other men for a fee. She drives a Toyota Crown; has a video, a tape deck, and a closet full of clothes. She has bought a piece of land in Chilomoni and is building a house on it. Her two children are at home in Rumphi.
All of these people, Mtendere, John, Peter, Madalitso, Zaccheus and Mercy have made at least one of their important life-changing decisions in the belief that their gateway to "the good life" is money. Many, perhaps most, people in Malawi would feel that they have chosen wisely. A few would believe that they have made very serious life-damaging mistakes. Who is right?
For over a century, now, Malaians have been taught the money gospel by westerners: missionaries, colonial officers, expatriate businessmen, and aid personnel - all making the assertion that being richer would make people here happier, and give them "the good life". Some proclaimed this gospel in words and teaching; others, particularly the missionaries, proclaimed it mainly by their deeds and life styles. The lesson has been very well learned and most people, Christian and non-Christian, alike accept it.
The time has come, however, to look at the evidence to see whether this gospel is true or false. And, further, it is time for Christians to examine scripture to see what God has to say about it. Does "the good life" come from being rich?
In this book, I hope to help people to look at both the concrete evidence and the Biblical testimony about riches, and also to try to explain why riches have some of the effect they have on people's lives. Then I'll make some concrete suggestions about what to do about it.
It is difficult for me to say accurately whether the growing wealth in Malawi has made people happier or less happy. Many people, the majority who continue as subsistence farmers, have scarcely been touched by it at all. Others have grown very rich indeed, and my access to that group is minimal, limited largely to headlines, gossip, and statistics, which do not give an entirely accurate picture of people's lives. What I know, however, does not suggest that on the whole they are a very happy group of people.
Even concerning those people whose lives touch mine, my view is narrow and incomplete. I can report and comment on what I've seen. But only you can really answer the question for yourselves:
Are you happier than your parents and grand-parents were? Has your increase in riches brought you peace, joy, contentment, love, security and the other things people most desire in life? Are those of you who grew up in poor families happier than you were when you were growing up? Are you experiencing "the good life"? Undoubtedly the answer will differ from individual to individual.
Certainly for many people there have been gains. Many are healthier and more comfortable than they were. Until very recently, life expectancy had increased for the wealthy, and in their families fewer babies died. Many have widened their horizons greatly and have been able to develop talents and skills that would have lain dormant perhaps in an economically poor environment. Many stimulating entertainments and occupations have become available.
On the other hand, there have been losses. Crime and, more recently violence, have increased. When I lived at Likwenu in the 1960's, we didn't lock our doors unless we were going to be away for more than a day, and left the keys always in the car. In those days, a stick laid diagonally across the opening of a village house was enough to keep people from entering. We walked freely at night - in town or in the bush - without fear of what other humans might do.
The growing separation of Malaians into four groups: the westernized elite, the urban poor, the village middle-class and the village poor has brought a great deal of division and confusion, and has seriously damaged the extended family, probably beyond repair. Members of the same family no longer understand each other's values, hopes and fears. Town children grow up alienated from their grand-parents, and mutual self-help has become difficult across the barriers of different life-styles.
Life may be more stimulating for the rich, but it is much less secure emotionally. Marriage has become less secure, and the damage done by divorce much more severe because of the breakdown of the extended family. More children are wounded by neglect; drunkenness and sexual misbehaviour with their accompanying traumas, as well as destructive emotions and emotional diseases have increased dramatically.
Because of the widening gap between the rich and the poor, jealousy, always a problem in a communal society, has become a paralysing force for many, particularly unselected school-leavers who, having set their hearts on extreme wealth, cannot tolerate a way of life many would have found prosperous and desirable even 25 years ago.
Many new symptoms of a sick society such as drug and alcohol abuse by young people, pornography, inter-generational alienation, vandalism, gang violence, runaway teenagers, and indiscipline among students and pupils have appeared. And others, such as abortion, homosexuality, sexual abuse of children, single-parent families and theft have increased dramatically.
Although some physical illnesses have become treatable and others rare, still others caused by luxury or the opportunities it opens up, have appeared or increased. The rich do not suffer from malnutrition, for instance, but do suffer the pains of gout, which the poor do not. Similar situations probably exist in the areas of mental and spiritual health. While there is possibly less witchcraft, the worship of money has for many replaced the worship of God.
All in all, it seems that while increasing wealth may have brought increased happiness to some, for many it has been a very mixed blessing and for some a disaster.
The lives of those people I have observed at close quarters seem to show that the dream of the good life through luxury is deceptive.
For some years, it was part of my job to pastor some of the wealthiest people in Malawi and their employees, some of the poorest. So far as I was able to discover, the two groups were about equally distant from "the good life". The problems the two groups faced were very different.
The problems of the poor were mainly material; the problems of the rich were mainly spiritual, emotional and social. But the amount of stress, agony and social dislocation caused by the problems seemed roughly the same. If anything, the level of peace and contentment were higher among the poor than among the rich.
Moreover, the fact that two groups of widely different economic levels lived in the same place caused problems for both groups. The poor were caught up in the destructive emotions of jealousy and resentment, continually faced with extreme wealth on their doorsteps. The rich, on the other hand, bore the burden of guilt for lifestyles which they knew were unforgivably selfish and a knowledge of being resented and disliked - both of which had a corrosive effect on their personalities and relationships. The mutual hostility the situation encouraged damaged everybody's peace and made anything like harmonious fellowship extremely difficult.
In that community, at least, riches did not seem to be solving as many problems as they created.
But after the adjustments were over we lived very happily indeed. In fact, I can say without hesitation that in many ways our 8 years at K2,000 a year were the happiest we ever experienced. And the skills and values we learned through living simply have been enormously valuable to all of us.
When I moved to The Polytechnic in 1973, my income more than doubled. For a few months, it was like Christmas every day. We bought a blender (liquidiser) and could eat cheese and chocolate, go to the films or the restaurant again. But the speed with which these luxuries began to seem like normal necessities was startling. At the end of six months, our feeling of elation at being wealthy began to fade and I began to feel resentful that some of my colleagues who were on salaries supplemented from abroad, were making much more than I was. Gradually, we stopped feeling rich and started feeling underpaid.
I am not trying to suggest that our eight years at K2,000 a year were happy entirely because we had very little luxury, though I believe that the lack of luxury was helpful for reasons I will discuss later in the book. The main reasons for our happiness were that we were doing work we enjoyed and felt good about, that we were living in a closely-knit community of generally sympathetic people most of whom were at a similar economic level, and that things to spend money on if we had had it to spend were generally unavailable in our rural environment.
Nor am I trying to suggest that our years at The Polytechnic were less happy entirely because we had more money, though I believe that was partly the reason.
The main reasons for our being less happy (but not unhappy) at The Poly were the large differences of income in the community we were in and the availability in our urban environment of many things which we could not afford.
The main point I am trying to make is that life at K2,000 a year was not less happy than life at K4,500 or even K45,000 a year. In my experience, the idea that being richer makes you happier has definitely not proved to be true.
If riches brought happiness, then Americans should be the happiest people in the world, because they are among the richest. Except for a very few at the very bottom of the economic heap, even those who think of themselves as poor are wealthier than all but the wealthiest here. "Poverty", in America, officially begins at an income of something like K30,000 a year for a family of four.
Are Americans happier?
Two incidents that took place recently in New York City among
people who are much richer than all but a few
Malaians, although by American standards their income is below
average, may help us to decide.
A young woman named Kitty Genovese was attacked by a man on the street. For nearly half an hour she struggled, screaming for help, as he tried to kill her. More than fifty people watched or listened but not one tried to help or even called the police. Eventually the man managed to murder her.
Last year a middle-aged professional woman was jogging in Central Park in the evening when she was attacked by a group of young boys from middle-class homes who ranged in age from 15 to 17. They beat her with metal pipes until she was unconscious, individually raped her and left her for dead. When asked why they had done this, they indicated that they lacked entertainment so were looking for something exciting to do. They had done it, they said, for fun!
Later, I will suggest several reasons why such things happen in very rich countries like America. For the moment, the point is that although they are not uncommon in America they are extremely rare in Malawi and happen only among the westernized urban population. Fifteen years ago, I doubt anyone here would even have thought of idly watching a murder or beating and gang-raping a woman "for fun". Today, when a secondary school student has just attacked his teacher with a brick, it's clear a new age is dawning in which such things are imaginable. But even so, who's better off - poor Malaians or rich Americans?
(I'be been using America as an example because it's the wealty country I know best, and because of its prestige in the world. But my point is not to condemn America, of which many good things could also be said, but simply to show that her wealth has not goven her citizens anything that could meaningfully be described as "the good life.")
But are these incidents characteristic behaviour or merely isolated and untypical misfortunes? Let's look at some statistics which will suggest an answer.
1) One million American teenagers a year run away from home. That's one out of about every 200 Americans. For Malawi to experience an equivalent number of runaways, we would have to have 35,000 a year, or 100 a day. Suicide is second only to accidents as a cause of death among teenagers. Eight out of every 100 teenagers in the U.S. attempt suicide.
2) A research study of 5,000 students at thirty-two American educational institutions showed that more than a fourth of the female students had been raped or sexually attacked since the age of fourteen.
3) More than a million American teenagers become pregnant every year. Of those pregnancies, three-fourths are unwanted. Four hundred thousand of them end in abortions. Of the live births, over one-half are to unwed girls. More than a million unwanted babies are aborted every year - or one abortion for every 200 citizens.
4) New York City, which has about the same population as Malawi, has a violent crime every five minutes. Around 60 Americans a day are killed by gunfire, either accidentally or by murder. In 1989, 9 out of every 100,000 Americans were murdered. That's 18,000 people. The equivalent number for Malawi would be 630 murders a year, or nearly 2 a day.
5) In 1990, according to TIME magazine, one out of every 100 Americans was addicted to cocaine. Malawi would have to have about 70,000 addicts ( 1 out of every 5 persons in Machinga, for instance) to reach the same level of addiction.
6) In big cities in America, loneliness is such a problem that volunteers now sit beside telephones 24 hours a day so that people who have no one to talk to can ring up to hear a sympathetic human voice.
7) Battered babies have become common enough to require special legal and medical setups to deal with them. (Battered babies are babies whose parents have systematically tried to injure them by throwing them against walls or down stairs, burning them with cigarettes, squeezing their heads in vices and similar things.)
8) One out of every 2 marriages in the U.S. ends in divorce. Psychologists report that for children, losing a parent through divorce has more serious psychological effects than losing one through death, so the unhappiness caused to children alone is immense. Almost half of the children being born in America today will live in a broken family - a family where there has been a divorce - before they reach 18 years old.
9) More tranqillisers are prescribed in the U.S. than medicines for any other type of disease and 1 out of every 8 Americans need sleeping pills to sleep. If the "good life" is obtained by wealth, why are so many Americans not able to face their lives without medicines to deaden their emotions?
These are only random statistics from newspapers, magazines like TIME and NEW INTERNATIONALIST, and the book, Why Wait?, by Josh McDowell & Dick Day. There are many others equally and even more horrifying.
But one has to travel to America regularly, as I do, talking with family and old friends, attending church services and parties, reading newspapers and visiting familiar places to feel how disoriented, restless, anxious, insecure and isolated individual Americans have become. Americans in general do not seem to recognise these feelings as bad because they have come to think of them as normal. But as I come straight from the much healthier atmosphere of Malawi, where they are not normal at all, the unhappiness is striking and oppressive.
Whatever good things riches have brought Americans, for most, peace of mind or happiness, moral behaviour and physical and emotional security are definitely not among them.
The evidence is strong that the promise of "the good life" through riches is false.
So far we've seen that my experience, the experience of at least some Malaians, and the quality of life in America and other rich countries seem to refute the assertion that being richer makes people happier.
Before we go further, it's necessary to look at what we mean by "rich" and "poor", "poverty" and "wealth," and the related word, "greed". Many books written today about wealth by first-world Christians contain the reassuring assertion, for instance, that scripture does not glorify poverty. This assertion is at best a half-truth, and to get at the whole truth, we need to know exactly what poverty is.
The Greek word ptokos, which is usually translated as "poor", and is the word Luke uses when he reports that Jesus said, "Blessed are the poor," actually means something closer to what is usually meant by "destitute" today. It refers to a condition of having absolutely nothing and is used to refer to Lazarus, the beggar, in the parable called, "The Rich Man and The Beggar" (Luke 16:19-31). It would be a distortion of scripture to ignore these uses of the word completely. Jesus in some sense, at least, does glorify something we often call "poverty".
The words "wealth" and "wealthy" are used in modern translations to translate a variety of words, some of which could be translated simply "possessions," and to translate the Greek word mammonas or "mammon". Some of these words have negative connotations and others are neutral. I will use wealth only in a neutral sense.
The words "riches" or "rich" are used in the New Testament to translate the Greek word ploutos and its related forms. These words always have negative connotations when referring to material riches, but are also used positively when referring to spiritual riches. I will follow scripture in this.
The Greek word, pleonexia, which is usually translated as "greed" used to be translated as "covetousness" and means simply "lust for more".
Different translations use different words to translate the same Greek word, depending on the interpretations of the translators, which shows that there is considerable uncertainty about exactly what scripture means in this whole area. If we're going to understand clearly what God is trying to teach us on these subjects, therefore, we need to redefine the words "poor", "poorness" and "poverty" more precisely. I have chosen definitions which seem to me to best illuminate the nature of the conditions God is telling us about.
The word "poverty" is best used to describe a condition in which the relatively low level of your income damages your emotional and spiritual well-being. Used in this way it is more allied with pleonexia than with ptokos.
Poverty in this sense can occur in people with high incomes as well as those with very low incomes. In fact, I think it is more common among the wealthy than it is among the poor. Let me explain.
One category of people who live in poverty are those who involuntarily have such a low income that either their basic needs for food, clothing and shelter are not met or to meet these needs they must damage their emotional and spiritual well-being by working unremittingly beyond their physical strength, enduring involuntary separation within their families or by behaving in ways they know to be evil such as stealing, prostitution etc.
Although scripture would use the word ptokos to refer to this condition, I think we can agree that Jesus would not consider it blessed as such, except in so far as it may lead people to depend on spiritual riches since they have no material riches to depend on. The reality of such a condition is, however, that although it has the potential to turn people to God, it does not lead most people suffering from it towards spiritual gain, but away from it.
Jesus' calling it "blessed", then, is probably a rhetorical device to make striking his teaching that spiritual well-being is infinitely more important than material well-being. That is roughly the same rhetorical device he's using when he says, "If your eye offends you, pluck it out."
Scripture's repeated call to "help the poor" (ptokos) would support us in our understanding that this condition is not desirable, though it's not clear whether our help is primarily desired because it helps people's physical condition, or because it forms fellowship ties between us and those we help. Certainly material assistance without love and concern is primarily destructive rather than constructive and is what has given the word "charity" such a bad smell that we can't use it any longer to mean Christian love.
Many refugees, people living in the Sahel where there is famine, the street children of Latin America, rural people in degraded habitats such as exist in the homelands within South Africa, and some at least of the street people of New York City, just to choose a few examples, lead miserable existences which it is difficult to consider blessed. These people live in a condition which can only be described as poverty.
People who voluntarily live at the same level of income, however, are poor, but are not are not living in poverty in the sense I mean. What is often called "voluntary poverty" is by any reckoning a blessed condition to which many Christians are called and joyfully enter, and which I think would better be termed "voluntary poorness", as I shall explain later.
At a much higher income, however, there are people whose strong desire for a higher income (pleonexia) paralyses them, damages them emotionally and spiritually, and forces them into behaviour which is degrading. These people, too, live in poverty.
Many people in western cities have much higher incomes than people in Malawi and have their material needs met more abundantly than many people here, but are still paralysed and degraded by their craving for the luxury they see around them. Their inability to achieve that luxury fills them with resentment, anger, bitterness, and hopelessness or, very often, leads them into crime or various sorts of bestial behaviour. They are, in fact, guilty of the sin of greed (pleonexia) and jealousy. But in their circumstances those sins are difficult to resist. They live in poverty, although their incomes may be quite high.
Part of the reason they are in poverty although they are rich by Malawi standards is that they belong to a culture which values income more than anything else. If a person is not earning money, he is felt to be worthless, no matter what other good qualities he might have. Men or women in such a culture who cannot find a salaried job feel degraded and ashamed, for instance, and even having to take a job that pays less than the person was previously earning can be very traumatic emotionally. Like all degraded value systems, the value placed on income in western culture degrades people.
(People in Malawi can contrast the very different attitudes toward unemployment and income which are traditional here and rejoice in them, while lamenting their gradual disappearance.)
Another reason why they live in poverty at a high income is that they are continually faced with and surrounded by incredible luxury. I've mentioned how when I moved to Blantyre from the rural area, my emotional well-being was affected by the availability of many things I couldn't afford and by the fact that others in equivalent jobs were earning much more, and therefore could display luxurious possessions and experiences which I couldn't. During my time of ministry among the super-rich in Malawi, I had mild attacks of the same feelings. And I experience a stronger version of the same thing when I go to America on leave. I am surrounded by things which I have lived very happily without for years, but because I am in contact with them, I am unhappy at not having them. I move temporarily from being relatively poor to poverty.
Less rich people who live in any city, but particularly western cities, are continually walking past stores filled with things they cannot buy and people who are dressed in clothes they can't afford and so on. Usually they spend long hours watching such people on the television or video as well. While I leave such places as soon as possible, they have to live in them every day. It is no wonder that city people's behaviour is notably degraded under those circumstances.
Another evil which produces poverty at high levels of income is advertising. In some western environments you are almost never out of reach of advertising. Every form of entertainment, every free space, everything you see or hear has some form of advertising in it. In Britain, for instance, the average person watches television containing 5,000 to 10,000 commercials a year (or 13-26 a day) 1 and in 1974, £1,500 million (about K1,000 for every person in Malawi) was spent on advertising.2 And all of it teaches that what Jesus says about possessions is wrong.
Advertising is designed to make people discontented with what they have. It's designed to create jealousy, covetousness and greed. No sane society would allow it to flourish. The bombardment is very powerful, even if you know that its basic message - that owning this or that is going to make you happy - is false.
When I go to the States, I prepare ahead of time a list of things I need to buy, and work out a budget for buying that fits my income. But decisions made in the healthier atmosphere of Malawi are soon skewed by the materialistic sickness of New York, which is usually my first stop.
Things I've enjoyed suddenly seem inadequate. I'm continually being told that I can't be happy without this or that which I never even thought of wanting. And despite myself, I am affected. Even after I return home to Malawi, I am hit by fugitive longings for some machine or gadget which I didn't buy. For people who can't escape, succumbing is, I think, almost inevitable.
Closer to home we have less extreme examples of the same things. Because of the structure of our school system, most pupils are filled with expectations of luxury which cannot be met. Unselected school leavers damage their lives by years of repeating Std. 8, or by paralysed "kungokhala" (idleness) at their homes, or worse in the cities, when they could be living constructive, happy, lives at a level of income far higher than many others. They live in poverty when they could be poor instead.
At a far higher level of income even in Malawi similar poverty exists. I've known a woman who was in tears because the company had denied her a second airfare to England that year. I've known other rich people who are full of bitterness because the company, which is already paying them an inflated salary far beyond the dreams of most people in the world, has refused them a rise, or made them pay for a previously free perk.
Zimbabwe has many whites who continually complain bitterly because their privileged lives, which are without a doubt some of the most gracious in the world, have become somewhat less privileged under the black government than they were before independence. Poverty, as I have defined it, knows no class or income level. It's a state of mind which is definitely destructive and is not glorified in scripture.
The condition which I am going to call "poorness", however, is glorified, or at least recommended, in scripture, not so much by recommending ptokos as such, but by condemning riches.
What I mean by "poorness" is having a low income or ling with a small expenditure without pleonexia or greed. This, I believe, is theĕ condition that Jesus considered "happy" or "blessed". And indeed, if we look around us in Malawi we can see many poor people full of peace, love and joy, living dynamic and creative lives which satisfy them. Although they have very low incomes, they have enough resources to ensure that their basic material needs for food, shelter and clothing are met without damaging their emotional and spiritual well-being. Although they are materially poor, they are spiritually and emotionally prosperous.
Most people from the first-world look at the poorness of people in Malawi and assume that we must be very unhappy because we have very few possessions. But anyone who lives here can see that this is not true. Of course there are many unhappy people everywhere, in both rich and poor communities. But just the fact of having a low income does not make people unhappy, as westerners think it does. It is very possible to be both prosperous and happy and at the same time poor.
To be poor in this sense is to suffer neither the degradation of poverty nor the degradation of riches. It is to have enough, but not too much. It is to have enough lacks to keep one from becoming bored with life, and enough unfulfilled desires to give life a goal. If you are poor, there are struggles enough to strengthen you, and provide a sense of satisfaction in overcoming them, but not enough to wound and destroy. It means not having so much that you don't need help from other people, but enough so that you can give help in return. It means being helpless enough to recognise your incompleteness, but not so helpless as to create despair or hopelessness. It means you are protected from the evils of having your every whim catered for and from the impulse to escape every difficult situation or onerous responsibility, giving you enough freedom, but not too much and enough power, but not too much. In short, it is the condition God intends human beings to be in.
A lot of confusion has been caused by a failure to distinguish between poorness and poverty, and between the two different kinds of poverty.
God consistently works for the elimination of poverty, and calls his people to do the same. The two different kinds of poverty, however, must be fought in different ways. Destitution, the first kind of poverty I've described, has to be fought with material weapons. If people are starving or naked, the first step in helping them is providing food or clothing. The second is providing the means to prevent a reoccurrence of the problem. This is what God is talking about in his repeated commands to help the poor (ptokos).
The second type of poverty, however, has to be fought with spiritual and psychological weapons because it is a state of mind, not a physical condition. Providing material aid is no help at all.
In both cases, the aim of the help is not to make people rich, but to bring about poorness.
Rich Christians have often, whether deliberately or subconsciously, allowed the blurred distinction between these three conditions to justify their tolerance or even encouragement of other people's poverty. The Biblical teaching of contentment in any condition, which is a technique for the elimination of poverty through the establishment of poorness, has been distorted so that it seems to encourage the very thing it is designed to eliminate. It is this false version of the gospel that led Marx to condemn Christianity. He was right in condemning it, but wrong in thinking it was Christianity.
It's now time to look more thoroughly at what scripture has to say about riches, poverty and poorness - the subject I shall refer to as "wealth" - in detail.
First of all, it's important to know that the Bible has lots and lots to say about wealth - more, in fact, than about almost any other topic concerning human behaviour. God clearly is very concerned that we should know everything there is to know about it. In the four gospels, one out of every ten verses is about wealth. In Luke, it's one out of every 7 verses. Every single author and almost every book in the New Testament has something to say on the subject. The Jewish Law has many statutes concerning wealth, and the wisdom books and the prophets often discuss it.
The second, and more important, thing to know is that almost everything that the Bible says can be summed up in the sentence, "Riches are dangerous; poorness is better." There can be no question whatsoever. God is against his children getting rich.
Let's look at the Old Testament first. If we study the parts of the Jewish Law that concern riches and property, we find that almost all of them are designed to prevent too wide a gap between the richest people and the poorest. In the first place, it was impossible to buy or sell land permanently. Every forty-nine years, at the Jubilee, land had to be returned to its original owners. This meant that nobody could be completely dispossessed because he had to sell his land in an emergency. His family would eventually receive the land back. Neither could a person become immensely rich by owning huge tracts of land. ( Notice that this is much closer to the traditional Malaian custom than it is to the European one.)
The laws concerning slaves were similar, except that slaves had to be set free every seven years, at the Sabbath Year, instead of every forty-nine. And not only that, the owner had to send the freed slave off with generous provision of animals, grain and wine.
One of the reasons that slavery is not condemned in scripture is perhaps because Jewish slavery was a much less evil institution than was 19th Century slavery, with none of its racially-based brutality and cruelty. It was closer to what we would call indentured-servitude. A man would sell himself as a slave when he was desperate for money, knowing that it would be a temporary situation and that there were many laws to protect him from mistreatment. In fact, Biblical slavery seems a beneficial institution, as one would expect of one instituted and condoned by God. A wholesale condemnation of slavery isn't very Biblical, and perhaps we should begin to revise our attitudes toward it in the light of Biblical revelation.
But the point for the moment is that God made provisions to ensure that even if a man sunk so low as to sell himself as a slave, he would not remain impoverished forever.
Two provisions concerning the lending of money worked against the accumulation of great wealth. Firstly, debts had to be remitted every 7 years, during the Sabbath Year. In other words, if a borrower was unable to pay back the money within 7 years, he would be forgiven the debt entirely. God even adds a footnote for those with a sharp eye for loopholes. He warns that it is sinful to refuse a loan to a poor man just because it is the sixth year and the money will be lost in 12 months.
Secondly, and even more important, it was forbidden to charge interest.
In the Old Testament, "usury" meant charging interest, and it continued with that meaning until about 900 years ago, when European Christians realised that people of other religions were getting rich by lending money at interest. The definition began to change then, and usury, which was still considered a sin, was redefined as "charging too much interest." This change by greedy and venial Christians marks the beginning of the gradual increase in the wealth of the very rich. This increase is one of the things which made the industrial revolution possible. It created the immense modern gap between the rich and the poor and is culminating today in large scale social disintegration and the destruction of the world through selfish consumption and pollution of its resources by the rich.
In addition, the Law had very strict regulations concerning what could be accepted as pledge on the debt, and under what circumstances such pledges could be kept or had to be temporarily returned etc. These were designed to protect the poor from extreme destitution or oppression at the hands of money-lenders.
Many of the farming regulations in the Jewish Law were designed for the benefit of the poor as well. Every seven years, during the Sabbath Year, it was forbidden to sow any seed, and the poor were to be allowed to gather whatever grew from seed that was already in the soil. In addition, farmers were instructed not to cultivate too close to the edges of their fields and to leave a certain amount of harvest in the field, or in the orchards. Both provisions were so that poor people and animals would be able to gather food, and to prevent the landowner from exploiting the land too ruthlessly for his own selfish enrichment.
In addition, every third year, the tithe was to be given to the poor rather than to the temple. (Deuteronomy 14:28-29)
Indeed, there are many verses which show us that God has a special concern for the poor and that in many cases he would leave the rich unrewarded while blessing the poor or even would take action to bring the rich down while he exalted the poor. The Psalms, particularly celebrate this part of God's salvation. The prophets, too, received many words from God attacking the rich. (See Isaiah 3:16-24, Amos 4:1-3 and Ezekial 7:19-22 for a few examples among many.)
God's special concern for the poor comes from his love of justice. God recognises that riches can only come about through the exploitation and neglect of the poor. It would be wrong to say that God hates the rich. He loves the rich as much as he loves the poor. But, because of his love of justice, he must act to right injustice, and that means he acts to uplift the poor and bring down the rich so that justice - very often equated with financial equality in the Old Testament - can be established.
This theme is one of the strongest in the Old Testament. Over and over again, God represents himself as the protector of the widow, the orphan, the poor and the stranger and commands his people to be so as well. And, indeed the theme continues over into the New Testament so strongly that James can say, "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress...." (James 1:27)
The significance of these regulations and and commands from the Law is clear enough, it seems to me. Although God did promise his Old Testament people "prosperity", and did not want them to lack a certain basic level of material well-being, he did not want them to become rich. He was leading them, in fact, towards what I am calling "poorness"
Finally, I offer you one more bit of Old Testament scripture which I believe is relevant. When God created Adam and Eve, he commanded them not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil lest they die. The result of Adam and Eve's disobedience is clear enough in terms of their alienation from God. But what was the purpose of God's prohibition and what exactly does the tree represent? God does not make purposeless prohibitions just to trap people into breaking his commands.
My own feeling is that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents the whole desire of man for greater and greater knowledge of the physical world so that he can manipulate it for his own selfish greed.
Thus the whole growth of technology is, I think, the fruit of the forbidden tree. Certainly we can see that with every benefit gained, and there are many, there are corresponding and slightly weightier evils produced. On the balance, and particularly taking eternity and spiritual and emotional health into consideration, the people of the technologically advanced world as a group are worse off than people in the third world. Luxury addiction, and materialism, atheism and the social and moral breakdown which we see in developed countries are the natural and inevitable result of their decision to partake that attractive and addictive fruit.
Perhaps you will not be willing to share this interpretation of these verses. If you aren't, however, what do you think was the purpose of God's prohibition?
When we get to the gospels, God's condemnation of riches becomes even clearer as the further revelation of his will through the life and teaching of Jesus unfolds.
Jesus states it very dramatically when he says that it is impossible for rich men ( without the intervention of God) to get into the Kingdom of Heaven in his very amusing image of a camel trying to go through the eye of a needle. (Matthew 19:16-26)
There have been recent attempts by rich Christians to soften the force of Jesus' comparison by suggesting that "the eye of the needle" was a narrow gate in the wall of Jerusalem. But this is most unlikely when you consider that Luke, who was writing for pagans who had never been to Jerusalem, uses the phrase with no explanation at all. It is much more likely that Jesus meant "needle" when he said "needle". And even if they are correct, it scarcely alters the basic thrust of the image.
But even if this one passage has a less categorical condemnation of riches than I am suggesting, it is impossible to ignore the many other passages that occur. Jesus, in fact, talks more about riches than he does about almost any other subject. And in no single passage is he favourable to them. Even in the parable of The Shrewd Manager (Luke 16:1-9) which is difficult to interpret, the point which Jesus draws out is about the proper disposal of wealth, whether material or spiritual, not the accumulation of it.
Jesus speaks about the rewards of giving up riches to his disciples in Matthew 19:27-29 and recommends to the rich young man that he give up all his property in verse 21 of the same chapter. It is impossible to suppose that Jesus meant there to be a rule that all God's children give up all their wealth, because with everybody giving away, there would be nobody to give to. But the story makes a clear point that riches are a hindrance to salvation, and is consistent with the rest of Jesus' teaching.
In Luke 16:13, Jesus' statement that you cannot serve God and money (or Mammon) is unqualified and a few verses earlier, he suggests that the proper use of money if you have any, is to give it away. Two verses later, he declares that money is disgusting in God's sight.
In Luke 12:13-34, Jesus advises that we guard against greed of any kind and against storing up possessions, once again advising us to sell possessions and give the money to the poor, noting in passing that it is pagans who set their hearts on wealth.
In Luke 6:20-25, he teaches that the poor are happy and the rich cursed. In the parable of the seed and the sower, he teaches that possessions prevent the growth of the Kingdom of God.
It would be possible to pile teaching on teaching, all negative towards riches. There are over 300 verses in the New Testament on this theme. But this book isn't primarily a Bible study. Those who want to look further will find a list of most of the relevant passages at the end of the book.
It is impossible to find a single verse where Jesus is recommending or approving of riches.
The parable of the talents is often used to justify the accumulation of riches and the charging of interest. But this is to misunderstand the parable completely. Parables are stories which use common physical things which people understood to explain difficult spiritual truths. The parable of the sower is not about planting seeds; the parable of the net is not about fishing, the parable of the yeast is not about baking, the parable of the lost sheep is not about sheep and the parable of the talents is not about money. It uses money as a symbol of spiritual treasure, and is telling us that when we use the skills and qualities that God has given us, they grow.
The testimony of the rest of the New Testament is entirely consistent with the teaching of Jesus. The immediate result of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was that the new Christians gave up private riches and held all things in common. In addition, the one command James gave Paul before giving him the authority to go to the gentiles was that he should not forget the poor. (Galatians 2:10) Paul, Peter and John join James in blanket condemnation of riches, the rich, and lust to get rich. A few quotations will illustrate the theme.
"Listen my dear brothers: it was those who are poor according to the world that God chose to be rich in faith and to be heirs to the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him. In spite of this, you have no respect for the poor. Isn't it the rich who are always against you? " ( James 2:5-6)
"But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy (or covetous (pleonexia)), an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man, do not even eat." (1 Corinthians 5:11)
"The love of money is the root of all evils and there are some who, pursuing it, have wandered away from the faith, and so given their souls any number of fatal wounds." (1 Timothy 6:9-10)
""You say to yourself, 'I am rich, I have made a fortune, and have everything I want', never realising that you are wretchedly and pitiably poor, and blind and naked too. I warn you, buy from me the gold that has been tested in the fire to make you really rich." (Revelation 3:17-18)
" Be shepherds of the flock of God that is entrusted to you: watch over it, not simply as a duty, but gladly, because God wants it, not for sordid money ["filthy lucre" in the KJV !], but because you are eager to do it." (1 Peter 5:2)
"Put greed out of your lives and be content with whatever you have." (Hebrews 13:5)
In view of the weight of multiple and consistent teachings about riches in the New Testament, it is startling that wealthy Christians have been so successful in explaining them away or ignoring them.
At this point in our examination of what scripture says about riches, it is necessary to deal with several more passages of scripture which rich Christians today use to justify their wealth.
Chief among these are those passages in which God promises "prosperity" to his people, such as Deuteronomy 28:11.
First, in the light of the rest of scripture, we must understand that "prosperity" is not the same as riches. In the Greek, they are entirely different words. "Prosperity" means having enough; riches means having more than enough. In Hebrew, the word translated as "prosperity" is often "shalom", which can also be translated as "peace" and refers to spiritual, emotional and physical well-being, excluding riches completely.
In Biblical times, perhaps, riches and prosperity were more closely related. Even the richest people were not so very far beyond having "enough". Since then, however, the riches of the rich has multiplied enormously, and even quite poor people in the west are richer by far than the rich in Biblical times.
Even Solomon, after all, who was very wealthy by Biblical standards, had no plumbing, no electricity, no appliances, no airplane or yacht, no modern medical care and so on. By modern standards his situation would have been declared substandard in some ways. Few modern Europeans, for instance, would care to live entirely as he did. The gap between prosperity and riches has widened enormously, and if we equate prosperity with the kind of riches now enjoyed in developed countries, we are seriously misunderstanding God's intentions.
Riches among Christians today are not a sign that God has prospered them, but a sign of exactly the contrary. It's a sign that because of their sin, they have given up God's prosperity in favour of the degraded and degrading pleasures of Mammon (or money). The prosperity that the Old Testament talks about means having enough to eat, a healthy water supply, a roof that doesn't leak and a blanket for the cold season, a good relationship with God and other people, and a peaceful mind, not cars, videos, jet travel, tape decks and so on.
And, in effect, the testimony of the New Testament is that riches are not only different from prosperity, but actively work against it.
One of the basic changes brought about by God's further revelation through Jesus is a shift in our understanding of the relative importance of the physical and the non-physical. In the Old Testament, God's salvation promises are primarily worked out in physical, or material, terms. The slavery the Israelites were rescued from was physical slavery; the promised land they were given was a physical land and so on. In the New Testament, those same promises are worked out primarily in non-physical or spiritual terms. The slavery we're rescued from is slavery to sin. The promised land we're given is the Kingdom of Heaven.
It follows that we are to interpret the promise of prosperity or wealth primarily in non-physical terms as well.Our Spirit-empowered Christian prosperity is more a matter of peace, love, joy, fellowship and unity than it is a matter of physical well-being.
Having said that, I would like to add that it is not sound to divide rigidly the two kinds of prosperity. Certainly Hebrew thinking did not do so, and our modern understanding of the nature of human beings is that the two things are closely related.
Our spiritual health, for instance, affects our emotional and physical well-being, and our emotional health affects our spiritual well-being. If we are involuntarily starving (as opposed to voluntarily fasting) it is likely to make a life of peace and joy more difficult, and so on.
On the other hand, physical illness or deprivation can, through God's Spirit, be a source of a growth in spiritual well-being, so the connection is not automatic, either.
I would not want to suggest that God's promise of physical prosperity has been withdrawn, or maintain that God does not look after the physical needs of those who radically follow him. There has, however, been a significant shift in emphasis between the two testaments.
In both the New Testament and in post-Biblical history, the prosperity God has granted to his dedicated children has included beatings, torture, starvation, humiliation, extreme poorness, and martyrdom. Obviously there are more important things involved in it than full bellies and dry beds.
If you're in prison, a failure in business, enduring extreme physical hardship, homeless, or suffering from an incurable disease and are receiving God's joy, peace and fellowship, then you're experiencing in a New Testament way the fulfilment of the promise God makes to prosper his people.
It is undeniable, however, that God made certain Biblical figures rich, at least by Biblical standards - notably Abraham and more particularly Solomon, and that for those figures riches are considered by the Biblical writers as a blessing.
One way of reconciling this with the bulk of Biblical testimony is to remember that God's dealings with his people under the old covenant were tutorial. In other words they were designed to lead his people towards, and prepare them for, the fuller revelation of his will in the new covenant.
An obvious example is the Law which in many respects is a pale shadow of the teaching of the new covenant. It counsels moderate revenge to prepare people for Jesus' total prohibition of revenge. It commands telling the truth in the court, to prepare people for our calling to complete truthfulness. It demands meticulous bodily rituals for worship to prepare people for faithful worship in spirit and truth - and so on. Paul expresses this by saying that the Law was a guardian only, no longer binding on those who have come of age.
In the same way, God's gift of material riches to Abraham and Solomon can be seen as a teaching device, to lead people who would not have understood more spiritual blessings towards an understanding of how abundantly he is prepared to bless us in more important ways.
It's also relevant, I think, to note that Solomon, for all his wisdom, was something of a disaster. Some of his riches were collected through the oppression of his people. Some of it, his many concubines, for instance, tookorms of which God could not have approved. He left his kingdom in a sorry state and was responsible forÝ· the division of it which was never healed (1 Kings 11:1-12:19). So using Solomon as an example of virtue is extremely dangerous, to say the least.
Perhaps, after all, God's gift of riches to Solomon was for the purpose of teaching us how powerfully destructive riches are, and how even the God-given wisdom of Solomon can be corrupted by it.
There are also several passages in scripture detailing the rewards of giving, such as Luke 6:38. "Give, and there will be gifts for you: a full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, will be poured into your lap, because the amount you measure out is the amount you will be given back," and Paul's attempt to persuade the Corinthians to be generous in 2 Corinthians 9:6-12 and his comment to Timothy, "Of course religion does bring large profits, but only to those who are content with what they have." (1 Timothy 6:6)
These are often interpreted in unspiritual ways by unspiritual teachers who wish to sell Christianity as a device for becoming wealthy. But in the light of the rest of scripture, it is not credible that God should reward us for the good act of giving away material riches with the very material riches which he considers bad for us.
Unless, of course, he wants us to become a bad example to others like Solomon, or a good example to others by giving it away. It seems much more likely that when we give materially, we are generally given material necessities and only spiritual riches.
I can believe, as is sometimes claimed, that God may have created numerous millionaires in Pastor Yonghi Cho's congregation in Korea. I am reasonably sure, however, that if they remained millionaires more than a few weeks, or, at least, continued spending their immense incomes on themselves, using them to make more money or living in luxury, they were corrupted by their riches and had departed from God's will.
I am also sure that God does sometimes provide abundantly the wealth necessary to accomplish his plan - transport, perhaps, or the money to buy or build a building, or salaries for assistants. But these are best seen not as rewards, I think, but as the equipping for service - material equivalents to the gifts of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians. They are given not at our pleasure for our pleasure, but at God's pleasure for his purposes. We don't receive them because we have given, but because we are willing to serve.
I, for example, have never suffered a moment of serious anxiety about money since with much anxiety, I began in response to a personal word from God to give away 1/10 of my gross income. At the same time, I have learned (from various signs and words too lengthy to go into) that God, very graciously, is never going to allow me to suffer the temptations of being rich, presumably because he knows how frail I would be against them.
I don't suppose, however, that either gift is a reward for giving. They are instead provisions to free me for ministry and to teach me something important and were given at the particular moment they were given, not because I began tithing, but because my beginning to tithe was a signal that I was ready to be obedient in God's service.
One final passage is much loved by rich Christians, and that is Paul's comment in Philippians 4:11-12 that he had learned to be content with whatever he had, knowing how to be poor and to be rich as well. Without wishing to deny the force of this, I think it's worth mentioning that there is nowhere else a suggestion that Paul was rich for any length of time at all. He certainly spent much more time in prison than in luxury. Either he is talking about brief stays with rich patrons or he soon gave away or gave up whatever riches he might have accumulated. It's also quite possible that what Paul meant by "riches" was having the basic necessities he was so often without.
In any case, I don't see why God would make Christians content with being rich despite their knowledge that millions of people are starving, and that their consumption of resources will cause starvation to increase. Such a contentment must surely come from some other source.
It's also important that Paul treats being Christian when rich as a kind of graduate degree of Christianity, something that ordinary Christians like you and me are not very likely to be as successful at doing as he was.. Against this passage, too, must be set his advice to Timothy, "If we have food and clothing, let us be content with that." (1 Timothy 6:8)
We can see that the overwhelming and consistent testimony of scripture in both the New Testament and the Old Testament condemns living at a level very much beyond that which satisfies our basic needs for adequate shelter, adequate food and adequate clothing for modesty and protection against severe weather.
There is another theme in scripture which is relevant and that is God's love and concern for his creation. The extreme accumulation of riches by some people has been the result of their willingness to exploit the world's resources ruthlessly and is resulting in severe damage to the whole fabric of the world God created, if not in its total destruction.
Western Christianity has forgotten or chosen to ignore that it was the world (see below section "The 'Body' and the 'World'" for a fuller discussion of "the world") that God loved so much that He sent His son into it (John 3:16). Equally neglected are the verses saying that the son's mission was to reconcile all things in heaven and on earth (Colossians 1:20) and Paul's eloquent assertion of creation's involvement in God's salvation. (Romans 8:14-22)
This has made possible a distortion in their understanding of God's placing man as a "steward" or a "lord" over the rest of creation. The correct Christian idea of lordship is, of course, the lordship Jesus exercised - sacrificial, selfless, loving. A Stewart is someone who preserves and protects property for its owner. What God was giving man was not the right to exploit and tyrannise over creation, but the duty to protect and nurture it.
Western Christians also tend to forget that God took great pains to protect all living things - not just man - in the ark and that the covenant He made after the flood not to send another one was made with all creatures, not just humans. Even the weekly sabbath was made for our domestic animals as well as us and the sabbath year was to be observed so that the animals of the fields could benefit from it. (Exodus 23:10-13)It is only our immense conceit that makes us think and act as if God were only interested in us alone. From the beginning he has cherished the world, and our calling as humans and as Christians is to cherish it as well.
We may think of animals as "dumb" and the rocks as lifeless. But scripture thinks otherwise. Psalm 98 says, "Let all the rivers clap their hands and the mountains shout for joy." Psalm 96 says Let the heavens be glad, let earth rejoice, let the sea thunder and all that it holds, let the fields exult and all that is in them, let all the woodland trees cry out for joy." Jesus on his triumphal entry into Jerusalem tells the Pharisees that if he makes his disciples be quiet, the very stones would cry, "Hosanna!" The language is poetic, but it's describing a consciousness in what we think of as inanimate creation, none-the-less. Paul, when he pictured all creation groaning in the struggle to bring the Kingdom of God into existence wasn't just being fanciful, but speaking of a sobering reality. We share God's love with all other created things, and our well-being is intimately tied up with theirs.
And, believe it or not, there is now scientific evidence that plants have memories, show fear and communicate with each other.3 For instance, when miombo trees are being eaten by goats, the other trees nearby begin to pump poisons into their leaves to discourage the goats from eating them. If you break off a flower, the other flowers nearby react. And if you come back, they remember you as a danger. It's been shown that fertilized eggs can pass messages to each other. There is even experimental evidence that grains of clay and even particles smaller than atoms have some means of communication. Western science is finally catching up with scripture!
But if there were no other scriptural prohibition on the misuse of creation, scripture's declaration that the created world is part of God's revelation of himself would be sufficient.
As Paul says, "Ever since God created the world his everlasting power and deity, however invisible, have been there for the mind to see in the things he has made." (Romans 1:20) and as the Apocrypha echoes, "Yes, naturally stupid are all men who have not known God and who, from the good things that are seen, have not been able to discover Him-who-is." ( Wisdom 13:1)
God, in fact, declares that all of the created world is his. In destroying it out of greed, we are dealing carelessly with our father's property. Or, to put it another way, contempt for creation is contempt for the creator.
Our human exploitation of nature has been in part been made acceptable to Christians by a misunderstanding of two Greek words used in the New Testament. The first is sarx, which used to be translated as "flesh", or in Chichewa, thupi. This translation, however, is misleading because it makes people think that Paul had a contempt for the physical world. A better translation of sarx is "human nature". What Paul is talking about is human reality, whether physical or emotional. This means that the "sins of the flesh", to use the archaic phraseology of the KJV, include not only fornication, but greed, pride, selfishness and so on. That God does not hold sarx in contempt, moreover, is shown by Jesus' becoming sarx. (John 1:14)
The second word is kosmos, translated "world". The trouble with kosmos is that it has a wide range of meaning rather like the English word "love". When God tells us to "love" one another, the word has a specific meaning which includes only one of the different meanings of "love". We are using a different meaning when we sing, "Love is a simple thing, love is a diamond ring," for instance. In the same way, when God says that he loves kosmos, he is talking about something different from what John means when he says we must not love kosmos. God is talking about the whole of his created world; John is talking about the luxuries and pleasures that result from man's misuse and exploitation of that creation, the fruit, perhaps, of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
If Christians take Paul's condemnation of sarx and John's condemnation of kosmos to mean that all physical things are condemned in God's eyes, it can lead to a kind of glorification of poverty which is unscriptural. But, more important, given the perverseness of human nature, it more commonly leads to the teaching that we are free to use nature carelessly since it is unimportant to God and that we are equally free to be as rich as we like because holiness is a spiritual condition.
A great deal of evil results from such self-gratifying interpretations.
There is one more strand of revelation in scripture which is against the sort of personal accumulation of riches that is going on today. To understand it, however, we must look closely at the situation.
In the last decade or so, we have come to understand much more clearly that the resources in the world are not limitless. Some, like water and trees are reneweable or recyclable, so that with care and controlled use, they will be available indefinitely. Others like oil and iron are not. When they are consumed, they cannot be replaced.
This means that it is completely impossible for everyone in the world to live at the level of luxury that is standard in the first world. The so-called "developing" countries" can never become developed to the same extent that first-world countries are developed. This would be true, even if the population of the world were not increasing. If everyone in the world, for instance, used petrol at the rate it is used in America, the world's supply would be used up in a couple of decades. If everyone tried to use water at the rate Americans do, there would not be enough fresh water to go around, even if care were taken to keep supplies from being polluted.
In addition, since every manufacturing process results in pollution, non-polluting use of resources is impossible, and development for all the world's population would result in a load of pollution which it would be impossible for the world to sustain. In fact, it is impossible for the world to sustain the present load of pollution. As you read, the well-being of the whole world's population is being damaged and endangered by the level of development in the first world.
These facts mean that the whole idea that economic growth is necessary for the well-being - even economic well-being - of human beings is a deception. The world is finite. It does not and will not grow. In the long run, the economic welfare of even the developed countries depends not on economic growth, but on economic shrinkage.
If the people of the third world are going to improve their lives materially, it will be necessary for the people of the developed world to reduce drastically their level of development. (If the father and his friends eat everything on the plate, the mothers and children in the family starve.)
The significance of these facts for our present discussion is that all the Bible's passages which teach against selfishness and greed become calls to rich people to give up their riches. The level of luxury currently enjoyed by a few people is only possible at the expense of the rest of humanity, not only present, but future. The rich today, no matter how godly their behaviour is in other respects, are guilty of exactly the sort of injustice God condemns so strongly in the Old Testament.
The resources consumed by the rich today mean that their children and children's children will be without basic necessities. The polluting wastes which are the result of rich people's luxuries are poisoning poor people thousands of miles away from them. When western industries spend millions of Kwacha doing research into ways of creating luxurious entertainments such as videos and compact discs, they are consuming financial and human resources which are desperately needed to keep other people from suffering and death. The chemicals expended to make rich people's produce look more attractive are not only being selfishly used up, but are damaging the soil and the environment so that future generations will experience catastrophic problems in growing enough food to eat. Every time we needlessly drive our cars, we are selfishly consuming energy that will be needed by our descendants to sustain life or health, poisoning those nearby, and causing people who live near the north or south pole to suffer skin cancers and other diseases.
So, when Paul says, "Do nothing out of selfish ambition," and "Always consider others' needs as more important than your own," when Jesus says, "Love one another as I have loved you," and, "Guard against every sort of greed," those teachings condemn the lives of all rich persons who continue to live in luxury, no matter how generous they are.
It is quite simply an act of extreme greed to use more resources, even renewable ones, than necessary. It is an act of extreme selfishness to cause more pollution than is absolutely necessary.
"I used to think, when I was a child, that Christ might have been exaggerating when he warned about the dangers of wealth. Today, I know better. I know how very hard it is to be rich and still keep the milk of human kindness. Money has a dangerous way of putting scales on one's eyes, a dangerous way of freezing people's hands, eyes, lips and hearts." Dom Helder Camara4
Christianity is an entirely practical religion. God commands things for one reason only: because those things will benefit us and work toward our well-being both in this world and the next. When God condemns riches and recommends poorness, it is because riches degrade and corrupt us in many ways, and hinder our experience of the Kingdom of Heaven and poorness makes us better and happier people.
In the first place, riches are an addictive substance. Like heroin or cocaine, tobacco or alcohol, the experience of them creates the desire for more of them. It is this quality of riches that has trapped most first-world people unknowingly. The luxuries they are used to become necessary to them, and push them into a never-ending scramble for new and greater ones. Dependency is very quickly established, and the level of tolerance continually rises. When a person cannot live peacefully without something that is not essential, especially a thing that is actually damaging to him or other people, or his relationship with other people, he should consider himself an addict.
While many addictions are inconsequential in themselves, they still are not part of God's perfect plan because they, not God, have control over our behaviour. They become, in effect, false idols which is why scripture equates greed (pleonexia) with idolatry.
Many of my Malaian readers will remember the pleasure they got from their first pair of shoes. The shoes made them feel happy - temporarily. Soon, however, wearing shoes became ordinary and gradually became a necessity. Today, those same readers would not be at all happy walking around barefoot, as they once were; it would cause them both physical and emotional trauma to do so. Dependency has set in. Today, buying a new pair of shoes does not give them much pleasure, and may even be a resented necessity, using money they would prefer to spend on something else. To get the same happiness they once got from having one pair of shoes, they now need to have many pairs, or specially smart or fashionable shoes. Their tolerance for luxury has gone up. They are addicted to shoes. They would not, for instance, give up wearing shoes to feed people suffering from famine. Other readers who have always worn shoes, perhaps, can recognise the same process going on in some other area of their lives.
When I first came to Malawi, I was addicted to a soft bed. If I tried to sleep on a mat, I spent a restless and unhappy night and arose full of aches and pains. Had I allowed it to continue, this could have interfered with my relationships with poor people who had no bed to offer me. I would have been reluctant to accept their hospitality. So I overcame my addiction and can now sleep happily even on concrete. On the other hand, I have never been able to completely overcome my addiction to cold drinks. If I am staying in rural conditions for more than a day or two, I begin to be plagued with desires for ice water or a really cold Sprite. These longings slightly disturb my peace and make me anxious to get away, a feeling my hosts no doubt pick up intuitively, no matter how careful I am to conceal it.
Neither of these addictions are serious. I mention them only as examples of how luxury addiction works.
On the other hand I once knew a very beautiful and dedicated Christian with a valuable ministry who had a luxury addiction that could have had serious consequences. She almost went home prematurely because she could not face life without a telephone. She had never lived without a telephone and did not have the ability to do so. The fact that 7 million or so people in Malawi live happily without a phone did not make any difference to her. She was a telephone addict and for her, then, a phone was a necessity. Fortunately for her, and us, the Post Office supplied her a phone just in time.
The trouble with luxury addiction, as with any addiction, is that the amount of craving never decreases and the amount of pleasure never increases. At whatever stage you're at in the growth of your addiction, there are things which used to give you your "high" but don't any longer and there are other things which you crave because you don't have them. At each stage the things are different, but the craving remains the same. And, the agony of being deprived of the things you now consider necessities is just as great as ever - but in addition there are more and more "necessities' in your life. For a luxury addict, the present level of luxury is never "enough", and his "necessities" exercise more and more control over his life as he accumulates more and more of them.
How many businessmen here could now happily eat the diet they ate happily at secondary school - or as children at home? Or walk several miles as they used to do? Would doing the things they used to do happily now cause them to feel resentful, injured, unhappy or unpeaceful? If it would, then they are luxury addicts, and their addiction is damaging their lives, if only in a minor way.
Lest anyone think I am pointing fingers only at other people, I will declare with no hesitation but with sorrow that I am a luxury addict. I think I can say that my addiction is under partial control, and that I am slowly making progress in overcoming it. But I am still an addict.
I now live without many things I once thought were necessities. I have learned, like Paul, to be happy and comfortable in conditions which once would have made me uncomfortable and unhappy. So there is progress.
At the same time, I know perfectly well that some people who are reading this are thinking to themselves something like this:
"Who is he to talk about how wonderful it is to be poor. He's rich. He's got a big house, a large garden, drives a car, and flies to the U.K. and the U.S. every three years. He eats expensive food, even in restaurants sometimes, has a closet full of clothes and a music system. What does he know about being poor?"
In other words, I know that I could preach the gospel of poorness - a task which I believe God has given me and which I think is urgently important - with greater effectiveness if I lived less luxuriously than I do. And yet, I can only push down my level of luxury gradually, step by painful step. I am a luxury addict. And the only advantage in that is that I know certainly from experience that wealth - or luxury - is addictive. So, I can warn others not to get into the fix I'm in if they can help it. You don't have to be a cured addict to preach passionately about addiction. But it helps to be an addict, because you know what the people you're trying to help are going through.
So to all luxury addicts, I want to say that I know you want to believe that I'm wrong. I know that iyou're serious about fighting your addiction you have a long bitter battle ahead of you. But I also know from experience that your addiction is damaging your life in many ways and that if you believe me just enough to begin the cure, that every successful rejection of luxury will bring you blessings: peace, joy, and fellowship. It works.cÁ
For many people, of course, the greatest damage luxury addiction does is to push them into destructive behaviour in an attempt to protect or increase their luxury. There are lots of luxury addicts in prison because they practiced fraud or theft. There are others who have cheated and injured other people who needed their help or were threatening to prevent them from getting richer. There are those addicts who have cut themselves off from their extended families to avoid a drain on their income or who leave their parents in poverty rather than give up their videos. There are those luxury addicts who ruin their educational careers through cheating. There are those who marry to increase their riches - or sell themselves to a sugar daddy.
There are luxury addicts who work themselves to death and others who sacrifice their families to their craving for wealth. There are those who neglect and abuse their children so that the family can have 2 incomes. There are others who endanger their families ( often without realising it!) by long absences caused entirely by their craving for luxury.
And there are those with a luxury addiction caught when they were overseas training who find the drop in their luxury upon re-entry so unendurable that they become alcoholics, or commit suicide.
The list is long and horrifying. I'm quite sure that luxury addiction causes more suffering in the world than any other addiction - even addiction to crack, heroin and alcohol.
The ability of riches to corrupt and degrade human beings lies partly in the fascination and addictive power exercised by the material things riches can buy, But people are also degraded and corrupted by the freedom and power riches deliver. Freedom and power are neutral in themselves, but as they increase, increased wisdom is needed to deal with them constructively.
Today, when freedom has for many replaced God as an object of worship, it is often assumed that any freedom automatically makes life better. It may seem shocking to read that you can have too much of it. But only certain freedoms are beneficial, and even the most obviously desireable freedoms can have destructive effects if they are exercised irresponsibly.
The freedom to have sex without the possibility of pregnancy, for instance, brought into being in America through contraception and legal abortion, has resulted in massive promiscuity which has extremely destructive physical, social and psychological effects. Even, say, freedom from illness, will cause an unwise person to lose compassion for people who are ill, or give him an illusion of indestructibility which leads him to irresponsible behaviour.
Freedom as an end in itself is often used to justify and establish quite evil behaviour. For many years, the tobacco industry was able to prevent the governments of America and Britain from taking steps to discourage smoking, even though it was known that smoking kills. Their effective argument was that any controls would interfere with people's freedom of choice. What they were really interested in, of course, was their own freedom to lure young people into becoming nicotine addicts through manipulative advertising.
Similar arguments are used in America to prevent the control of guns, even though free gun ownership has been shown to cause many deaths every day. And parents, who wouldn't let their children freely play with fire, still refuse to teach them religious beliefs on the grounds that the children should be free to choose what they will believe. And so on.
Even the freedoms promised by the gospel - freedom from control by sin and freedom from the Law - are made possible only by the granting of the Holy Spirit to all believers so that his wisdom is available to them. Without the Holy Spirit to convict us, we would be dependant on the Law for guidance.
If a person has money enough, he has the power to gratify every momentary whim or desire. Very often, doing so is a mistake. It could be a whim to give away K1,000, but it could equally be a whim to shoot heroin. (That's one of the reasons I know that God will not answer our every prayer affirmatively. Very often what we want most is what we need least!)
I'm sure we can all remember things we wanted which we're very glad we didn't get. If I had married the girl I was desperately in love with when I was 15, for instance, my life would have been hellish. I know, too, that if I had had enough money to be a drunk when I was an adolescent, or if drugs had been readily available, would have becomeÖ+ either a drunk or a drug addict. I was unhappy enough to want very much to blot out the reality of my life. And, as a matter of fact, when I spent three months as a desk clerk in a hotel where I had free access to as much drink as I wanted, I was drunk every night. I am very grateful indeed that neither booze nor drugs were ordinarily available to me. If I had not been quite poor, they would have been.
Riches give humans greatly increased power and freedom without any increase in wisdom. In fact, riches tend to decrease wisdom because they distort people's view of reality. So the power and freedom riches provide, although they have the potential for good, are almost always used in the wrong ways, with destructive results.
This can be clearly seen in technology. Technologically advanced people can do much more than technologically primitive people, but they have no better idea of what to do. In fact, they're inclined to have a worse idea of what to do. Theoretically, their power and freedom could be used solely for good, but in practice, it isn't. Every technological advance has good results, but trails evil behind it which usually overbalances the good.
Power and freedom can make what is good better, but they also make what's bad worse. And, given our human inclination towards evil, the making of what's bad worse is what predominates.
We can see this in the mad rush of wealthy people for comfort and pleasure. All humans would like to have physical comfort and material pleasure, and they are not evil in themselves, but the search for them tends to be destructive, and the possession of them is dangerous. Among the poor, the destructive impulse to seek them for their own sakes is kept in check by powerlessness and lack of freedom which serves to protect poor people. Riches, however, release a flood of seeking after pleasure and comfort such as that creating so much trouble in the developed parts of the world today, damaging society and creating many emotionally and spiritually disabled people.
One of the basic gospel statements is that real well-being can be achieved only if material comfort and pleasure are abandoned as primary or controlling goals. Those who seek to gain their lives, it says, lose them. The poor will inherit the Kingdom of Heaven, but the rich will be cast down. Those who humble themselves will be lifted up. If we sacrifice, we shall be rewarded. And, since the principle applies not only to creation, but the creator, God could rescue us only by temporarily damaging his unity and peace. And, of course, Easter was only made possible by the crucifixion. The message is stated in many different ways and applied to many situations, but the principle remains the same.
The validity of the principle can be illustrated by a physical example. Great physical skill or strength can be achieved only through sacrifice and suffering. Whether one is a violinist or a football player, a ballet dancer or a mountain climber, thousands of boring and repetitious exercises must be done to train the body, and muscles must be strained to the point of pain. In order to be a great athlete or artist, one must give up many of the comforts and pleasures ordinary people delight in, but the achievement and greatness gives one pleasures of an entirely different magnitude and quality than the ones given up.
Rich people often look at poorer people and assume that their poorness makes them unhappy because they lack the freedoms and powers which the rich soon come to believe are essential for happiness. But the situation is actually the reverse. Many, if not most, rich people are unhappy because their freedom and power are far in excess of their ability to deal with them wisely and constructively. They are prey to their own worst impulses and unprotected against their weaknesses, and so rush headlong towards the very things which will contribute to their unhappiness.
Had they less power and freedom, they would be better off in many ways.
One of the ways in which the added power created by riches damages people is by permitting the growth of communities and gatherings which are so large that they are too big for a network of personal relationships to be a major factor in the way they function.
In a village, everyone knows everyone else. This is a strong force for good. People find it difficult to behave in ways that are disgusting or immoral to the rest of the group. Even for prominent people in Blantyre, this functions. I know perfectly well, for instance, that if I were to pick up a bar girl at a hotel in Blantyre, the news would soon travel throughout the community of people I am serving. The lure of foreign travel for many lies in their ability to get far from anyone who knows them so that they are free to misbehave there. Even a small city like Blantyre, however, grants many people anonymity. They can behave anyway they like without fear of people whom they care about knowing what they have done.
In addition, groups form which are so big that the individual feels no responsibility for the welfare of the whole. The technology which permitted large tower blocks of flats to be built was destructive. Such blocks have everywhere been disasters exactly because they are too large for a sense of community to develop, so that the individuals felt alienated and isolated within them. The great democracies suffer from the same problem. In America, for instance a voter has 1/280,000,000 of the power to decide in an election. Given that tiny influence, he is not likely to bother to inform himself of the issues so that he can vote responsibly or to vote if it's inconvenient.
The development of electronic systems of amplification, and the media, permit the growth of mega-meetings, mega-churches and mega-audiences. Many people assume that this is good, but my belief is that such affairs, though they may produce more spur-of-the-moment "decisions" for Christ, actually produce fewer Christians than eyeball to eyeball evangelism or pastoring. Christian growth depends on the availability of the nourishing relationships such mega-units cannot provide.
In any group which is too big for personal relationships to be a major factor, the opportunities for corruption are very great indeed, and living the Christian life becomes very difficult. Many of the things Jesus taught work well only in a small community. An example is, "Give to everyone who asks," advice which is possible to follow only in a group in which the askers and the givers are well-known to each other.
The power riches give people to move easily from place to place also works for evil simply because people can easily run away from their problems and responsibilities, as in going to conferences as an opportunity for dirty weekends. In addition, sociologists have noted with serious concern that in America, where families stay in one place only two years on the average, there has been a decline in the depth of relationships. If you're not going to stay in a place, you don't make the effort, or have the opportunity, to form deep intimate relationships.
Perhaps one of the reason promiscuous sex is such a prominent feature of American life is a search for deep satisfying and intimate relationships which people mistakenly think casual sex can create. Research among young people in America suggests that this is the case.5
Riches also degrade people because they create boredom. Wealthy people, and many poor people as well, think the life of the poor is more boring than the life of the rich. But the opposite is true, because in a wealthy life, there are almost always too few struggles, too few goals, too few experiences to look foward to, and pleasures become so commonplace that they cease to please.
One of the reasons riches become a necessity to rich people is that they continually need the stimulation of new experiences: trips to more exotic locations, faster cars, more bizarre clothes, rarer foodstuffs and so on. Since each new craving is very easily satisfied, it is very rapidly replaced by a newer one. And when the ultimate limits are reached, boredom sets in.
Think of the fact, for instance that people spend thousands of Kwacha to come to Malawi, which to them is strange, exotic and therefore interesting. Many of the things they find interesting we find ordinary. We spend lots of money to go somewhere else. (if we're rich, that is.) But when you've been to many places like Malawi, you have to work harder and harder to find somewhere that interests you. For poorer people, who have to wait in anticipation for years to go to a foreign country, or even to a game park, the pleasure is greater, and lasts longer - in part because the anticipation is itself a pleasure.
In America, at least in the cities, if you are wealthy, you can have any food you want any time you want it. If you want strawberries in winter, or frozen pies in summer, they are easily available. People think this gives them more pleasure, but in fact, it decreases pleasure. Strawberries and frozen pies taste much better when they are available only part of the year. The first mango, or naartjie of the season gives us special pleasure because we've been without them. By the end of the season, we're a bit bored with them and looking forward to the next fruit to appear.
Rich first-world children have seen everything and done everything reasonable at a very young age. They know lights bright enough to damage the eyes, and sounds loud enough to damage the ears. They have seen the best this, the biggest that, the most this and the fastest that. Nothing surprises, nothing delights. It is not really surprising that some turn to drugs, attempted murder and gang rape because they lack entertainment.
Another reason riches degrade people is that riches focus people's attention on things and distract them from relationships.
There are more than one way in which it does this. One is that riches tend to surround us with things. And every possession occupies our time and attention to a degree. They must be cared for, protected, stored and repaired. We worry about their being stolen. We spend time deciding which one to buy, then we spend time learning how to use them. When we meet together we discuss them - their performance, their price and their relative virtues. We scheme to get the best deal in buying them and selling them. Quite often we are alone when we use them. Very often they prove costly and swallow money which would better have been spent on something else. And usually this time, attention and money are expended at the expense of the forming, tending, deepening and preserving of relationships.
Consider, for instance, how few jobs in the village are done alone. Many activities are communal and involve mutual assistance, communication, laughter and so on. Consider, on the other hand, how many jobs in the city are individual, how often a person is alone with a machine with no mutual relationships at all. Consider too how few city people work in their homes or with people they know well or love. Poor people ride communally in buses or walk in groups. They greet one another and sometimes chat. Rich people drive cars - very often alone. They listen to the car stereo.
I have seen first hand in Malawi how communication decreases in a family when they buy a video. Instead of spending an evening chatting, they spend the evening in silence looking at a machine. Computers have a similar negative effect on communication in a family.
I know a family in the U.S. which has three children and four videos - one in each child's room and one in the livingroom. When the children come home from school, they each go to their own room to watch video - alone. When the father comes home from work, he watches the video in the livingroom - alone The mother prepares the evening meal alone in the kitchen. No one offers to help her because she has appliances that do most of the work. When dinner is ready, they eat it together, and as each finishes, he or she leaves the table and returns to his or her video, leaving the mother to clean up. Nobody can be of much help to her as she only has to put the dishes in the dishwasher anyway.
I think there are days when any two of them exchange less than two dozen words. Their primary relationships are with their machines. The same family has 3 cars, so that each can do things at the same time - separately.
Riches also work against good relationships by decreasing the opportunities for shared work. Shared work is a very powerful mechanism for creating relationship ties. It was once traditional in America for instance, for serious conversations about difficult situations to take place while the food was being prepared or the dishes were being washed and dried. It was there that a fiance learnt to know his mother-in-law, or a daughter got the courage to ask her mother about sex. I, in fact, asked my intended father-in-law for permission to marry his daughter while we did the washing up. The shared work makes such occasions less awkward and intense, allowing for long pauses in the conversation without embarrassment and thus making it easier to avoid blurting out something tactless or stupid. It was also then that guests were able to show their appreciation for hospitality and to make the giving in the situation mutual instead of one way. It's true that dishwashing machines freed some people to leave the isolation of the kitchen and join the leisure activities in the livingroom. But the gains don't balance the losses. (The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?) When there are machines to do the work, the opportunities to benefit from shared labour disappear. Shared entertainment, also a powerful relationship-builder suffers a similar disappearance when machines provide the entertainment.
Another loss of relationship building occurs when wealthy families move toward hiring professionals to take up functions that in poorer familes are provided within the family. If a family hires a nanny, they may lose in two ways. In the first place the child is in the care of a stranger whose primary tie with the child is financial, not affectionate. If affection does develop, it is between people whose primary ties are elsewhere, creating divided loyalties. In the second place, a family member has lost an opportunity to be of use in the family, to show love and concern for them.
In Malawi, in fact, riches are destroying the extended family. Among the poor, the exchange of family relatives to cement the family ties is a matter of mutual help. A visiting youngster can help with the family work, helping to grow his own food or build his own shelter. When one family member becomes rich, the relationship is drastically altered. A visiting youngster becomes a parasite who has little chance to make a contribution in the family. Food and shelter are bought, not produced, and he has no money. His brain and muscle are degraded in importance. And, in any case, it looks to him as if the family is so wealthy that no help is needed. Thus his presence is resented, or merely tolerated instead of welcomed, and he, in turn, does not receive the help it looks to him would be easy for his relative to give him.
This loss of opportunities for service is another way in which riches degrade people. Often when rich expatriates look at children in poor Malaian families working hard for the good of the family, they feel pity for the children. Their pity is misplaced, however, for such children are generally gaining something extremely valuable - a sense of self-worth, and a secure and valuable place in their world.
The children they should feel pity for are those in rich families who make no useful contribution to anybody even as far as adulthood, but are entirely parasitic on the family wealth. Such children have no chance to have the satisfaction of helping others or of being of use. They must struggle for a sense of self-worth by engaging in useless competitions against each other or against artificial obstacles, trying to establish themselves as the strongest, the quickest, the most agile, the most intelligent, or the most daring. ( Or, in the case of adolescent boys, the one with the largest generative organ.) If they fail to secure a place for qualities society considers good, then they turn to finding their security in being the ugliest, the weakest, the most dishonest or disobedient. The insecurity and chronic competitiveness which characterizes rich westerners has at least one of its roots in this failure to provide children with useful respected work to do.
The hiring of professionals and use of machines shoves out family members whose only talents are not of professional quality. Unmarried daughters, young children and the elderly all tend to be robbed of their value and secure place in the family's affections by this process. Instead of listening to a family member perform a dance or sing a song, the family listens to a famous musician or watches a famous dancer on a machine. If a young couple are having difficulties, they go to a paid counsellor instead of to the family elders. When a girl needs to learn about sex, she reads a book rather than talk to her grandmother or aunt. Gradually non-saleable skills and talents are robbed of respect, and the people having them are marginalized.
A further way in which riches make good relationships more difficult is that wide differences in income level interfere with fellowship. Close fellowship between a person who is rich and one who has a very low income is extremely difficult. The relationship becomes twisted or corrupted in one way or another.
In the first place, simply making conversation is awkward because the two are interested in very different things and have had different experiences. I experienced this when I was ministering among the super-rich. They were interested in talking about trips to Mauritius, golf, growing orchids, which car to buy, or how to import goods without paying duty - all of which were outside my experience. I, in turn, wanted to share my experiences in a world totally outside theirs.
Hospitality is difficult because each is unsure what would suit the other, and either way, the guest is put in an environment which makes him unsure and awkward. The poor person is afraid to invite the rich one because he's afraid that his food, housing, bedding, toilet facilities or whatever will be distasteful to the rich person. And accepting such an invitation, at first anyway, gives the rich person qualms. If the rich person offers hospitality which is never returned, however, the poor one either loses heart or, the relationship becomes distorted because all the giving is one direction.
When that happens, the relationship almost always becomes, even against everybody's will, financial rather than loving or begins to die. The poor person's thinking inevitably begins to include the thought that he is going to gain materially through this friendship, even if it's just a matter of eating rich foods or experiencing unusual luxury. The rich person, on the other hand, begins to think of his generosity in sharing his luxury. On both sides, an element of calculation, manipulation and exploitation creeps in.
Or, the poor person begins to feel degraded and embarrassed by always being on the receiving end, while the rich one begins to feel exploited and unsure of the poor person's motives in pursuing the friendship.
Two further facts inescapably bedevil the relationship. The first is that the rich person could easily solve many of the poor person's problems by using his money to give assistance. Whether he does so or not, he always reaches the limits of his joyful and willing giving before the poor person runs out of problems. If he tries to limit his giving in an attempt to try to keep the relationship from becoming one-sided or exploitive, his attitude is not likely to be understood. Either way the poor person naturally begins to wonder what kind of love it is that refuses to help a friend in need.
It is equally true that the poor person could solve many of the rich person's problems. But given the almost inevitable feeling on both sides that riches is a sign of high personal quality, the poor person hesitates to give advice, and the rich person hesitates to accept it. This can be overcome, but not without struggles on both sides.
The second fact is that inevitably, by sharing his rich life with his poor friend, the rich person is creating luxury addiction. It's like advertising. The poor person is being introduced to things he cannot afford but which are attractive to have. Unless the relationship goes far deeper than most such relationships go, the poor person will think the rich one is much happier than he is, and attribute the happiness, wrongly, to wealth. Even if the rich person opens his heart in an attempt to keep this from happening, the poor person will have difficulty believing the truth.
I am speaking from my own experience and the experience of any missionary who tries to form relationships with the people he serves. Almost any missionary will admit, if he's honest, that the bulk of his deep, mutual, relationships are with people whose incomes are not a lot lower than his.
If differences in income stifle fellowship, the only solution is for the rich to lower their income. It is not possible now, nor will it ever be possible, for all people with low incomes to become rich.
It is not only relationships between people that are made more difficult by wealth. Our relationship with God is also affected. As our power increases through wealth, so does the temptation for us to suppose that we are all-powerful.
The growth of our human knowledge about the physical universe, for instance, and the growth in our ability to manipulate it for our own ends ( the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?) has caused many people to make human intellect into a false god. It is to science, or to their own minds, that most developed people look for salvation.
As riches grow, the works of humanity grow in influence in relation to the works of God. For a person living in Manhattan, for instance, the entire environment is man-made. The tallest things he knows are buildings, not mountains. The flowers he knows are plastic, or at least artificially planted. The lights of the city obscure the moon and the stars, which become invisible, or nearly so, and make the passage of night and day less relevent. The noise of the city is louder than thunder. The most beautiful things, the most amazing things, the most startling things in his experience are all man-made. He can live his whole life, in fact, without ever seeing anything resembling a natural landscape. It is not really surprising that in such places atheism and humanism flourish and people begin to think they can get along very well indeed without God - or even suppose, as a visitor I had recently supposed - that they themsels are God.
If there is a centra£7l truth which the gospel teaches about living "the good life" it is that good relationships, both with God and with other people, are of supreme importance. The power which riches have to hinder and destroy good relationships is the main reason why God condemns them.
Given all the ways in which riches work against high-quality relationships, it is not surprising that one of the most severe penalties of riches is loneliness.
Loneliness is the besetting illness of the rich.
Striking proof of this exists in the need for the special telephone services for lonely people I mentioned in the first chapter. In most big cities in North America or Europe, there are people, sometimes called Samaritans, who volunteer to make sure that there is someone 24 hours a day to answer a certain phone when it rings. The phone number is then publicised so that people who are desperate for someone to listen or to speak to them can use it. Do you suppose that in all of Africa, even now with the growth of the cities, there are enough lonely people with no one to talk to to make such a Samaritan set-up worthwhile? I doubt it.
In southern England it is not uncommon for elderly people to buy milk simply because the man who delivers it is the only human they ever talk to. Nor is it uncommon for an elderly person to die without anyone noticing until the body begins to smell after several days. There's even at least one case in which a wife living in the same house as her husband noticed his death for the first time three days after it had occurred.
Riches encourage loneliness in a number of ways, the most important of which is the breakdown of relationships, as detailed in