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 theī 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 forŨˇ 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 centraŖ7l 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 the last few chapters. Another is simply by decreasing opportunities for human contact.
The house of the American family I described two chapters back who had three children and four videos was large enough to have a bedroom for each child. If they had been poorer, and the children had slept together in one room, perhaps in a cluster on the floor, their isolation would have been near to impossible.
In a large house, two family members who are having a difficult relationship problem can live almost separate lives, so that they can avoid resolving the conflict and healing the relationship.
We need only to look at the phrases "high-density housing" and "low-density housing" to find another way in which riches decrease human contact. Riches make it possible for people to command large areas of space, so they live farther apart. Partly for this reason, it is common for rich people to have no knowledge of the people who live next to them, something unthinkable among the poor. In a case I read about recently from California, a man learned only from a newspaper of the death of the teenage son of the family directly across the street from him.
The moviousness of modern life contributes to this situation. In my immediate family of parents and four children, no two of us lives closer than 1,000 miles apart. I have never met my only cousins, who live another 2,000 miles further away than the rest. What chance do we have of forming close family relationships?
Perhaps it is fair to say that of all the evil results of wealth, loneliness is the most pervasive and the most destructive.
One or two other ways in which riches degrade people need to be mentioned. First of all, riches encourage the sin of pride. We are well-acquainted in Africa with visiting "experts" and consultants who suppose that because their societies are richer they are superior in all respects.
But in everyday situations, people who have large financial resources have fewer occasions when they need the help of other people. How this works for pride is obvious. Even more, however, it robs them of the tremendous benefits of receiving love and care. One of the problems rich people face which creates a lot of emotional insecurity for them is that it is difficult for them to identify people who care for them personally and those who are interested only in their money.
Girls who have the misfortune to inherit great wealth, for instance, have great difficulty building a satisfactory marriage. Not only are they surrounded by fortune-hunters to confuse them, but that experience causes them to distrust any who might genuinely be devoted to them.
One of the experiences of my life that I look back on as being very beautiful seemed at the time to be very traumatic indeed. When I was coming to Malawi, I was told that money for our transport was available. Then, after I had resigned my job, sold my house, and generally burnt my bridges at home, I received a cable saying that there were no funds after all. In the emergency, I turned for help to my church community and in a very few weeks the money came in. Many people who I didn't even know knew us were happy to make resources available to help. It was very touching and emotionally strengthening to us in many ways, and helped give us a sense that God was actually behind our decision to go. If we had been rich enough to just buy the tickets, we would have missed out on that blessing.
The same situation is repeated in smaller ways in many people's lives. It is a boon and a blessing to need, and thus receive, other people's help.
Along with the pride which riches encourage goes selfishness. The more wealth you have, it seems, the more you want to keep. The selfishness of the azungu (Whites) is well-known, and is a result not of some tribal characteristic such as fair skin and straight hair, but the result of being rich individually and part of a rich culture . Americans, for instance, on the average, give away a smaller percentage of their incomes than almost anybody else. What looks like generosity when viewed in cash figures, becones meanness when compared with the riches from which it is given.
Although the effect riches have on generous giving may seem strange at first glance, it becomes understandable if we think of luxury as addictive. Few heroin addicts are generous enough with heroin to risk having a shortage themselves.
And finally, it's important to note that riches corrupt the poor by causing jealousy, envy and poverty. Riches have an attractive exterior. Poor people looking at the rich believe the rich to be much happier or better off than they are. So they become discontented and begin to destroy their lives in their lust for riches. Many people here, certainly most of those who have never been there, believe the people of America to be much happier than the people of Malawi, when the truth is just the opposite.
The early missionaries, because they were economically more developed than their converts, and because they considered economic development wholly desireable, created the impression that one of the benefits of being a Christian was riches, an impression that is still damaging and distorting the proclamation of the gospel today.
For western missionaries who are sensitive to the situation, this is a point of major unease and soul-searching. No matter how much poorer we've become, we still look very rich here in Malai. That means that no matter what we say, our actions and lifestyles are still proclaiming that distorted and inferior gospel, encouraging Christians to stumble and sin in this whole area of their lives. No matter what help we are giving, in that one respect we are doing harm, and must ask God and the people we're trying to serve, for forgiveness.
In discussing the ways in which riches degrade humans and interfere with their salvation, it is necessary to take into account the benefits which are irrefutable. Two of these are education and health care. It is quite true that the improvement which riches make possible in both has been beneficial.
But they have not been as wholly beneficial as most wealthy people suppose. What has, for instance, universal and compulsory education in the U.S. achieved? Certainly not a harmonious and happy society.
As someone who has spent most of his life with university lecturers and graduates, I can testify that we are no more reasonable, moral, compassionate, or generous than uneducated people. If anything, we are less so. We aren't even wiser. We simply have more knowledge. And knowledge, like freedom and power, is at best a neutral quality. In the hands of wise people, it works for good; in the hands of fools, it works for evil.
In the eyes of most westerners, health is perhaps the most important benefit of wealth. And one cannot deny that in general the wealthy are physically (but not mentally or spiritually) healthier than the poor. (I am not, of course, talking about the destitute) The difference, however, is much exaggerated.
For one thing the exaggerated claims made for the success of western medicine focus heavily on very expensive and complicated procedures which actually benefit very few people. Meanwhile many ordinary diseases and conditions which affect millions of people, such as the common cold, and pre-menstural tension remain as incurable as they are in a third-world village.
In addition to being of very limited benefits, such expensive remedies make the life of poor people worse. If you are dying of an illness, the knowledge that if you had more money you could be cured works strongly against your dying at peace with God and with your families and friends. The development of AZT is, for most AIDS victims in Malawi, for instance, a curse rather than a blessing. Few can afford the K1,000 a month for treatment. But the knowledge that it exists means that fewer people will benefit from the disease's one good feature - the opportunity the knowledge of certain death gives them to die in fellowship with God and fellow man.
The claims also ignore the failure of western medicine to deal successfully with emotional and spiritual disorders for which poor peoples often have effective treatments.
They also tend to ignore the many things riches produce which are damaging to health as well. While rich humans live longer than poor ones, they quite often feel less well while they're alive. Riches bring the possibility of better nourishment, for instance, but they have also flooded the world with junk foods which give little nourishment and are often actively poisonous. Babies and small children were better off drinking water or mother's milk than drinking coke, fanta or bottled milk. In addition, people who have an unlimited food supply often eat more than they should, and exercise less than they should, a combination which brings a whole complex of health hazards of its own.
Rich westeners for many years now have thought of their fat and protein-rich diet as more healthy than the diet of poor people in the third world. They have felt pity for people who ate meat only two or three times a week, and had a diet made up primarily of grains and members of the bean family. However, nutritionists have now discovered that a high-protein high-fat diet is actually unhealthy, a causative factor in a large range of illness including heart-disease, cancer, and osteoporosis. They are now recommending that rich people make drastic changes in their diet to bring it in line with what poor people eat.
Modern luxury is, in addition, built in part on the creation of thousands of chemicals, and result in the creation of thousands more as waste products. These chemicals find their way into the air, the water, the food people eat. They are absorbed from the artificial materials people use in their houses, their house furnishings and their clothing. Many of these chemicals are harmful and create illnesses in people. Some of these illnesses are very serious and cause death.
But even more cause things like, headaches, fatigue, muscle and joint aches, skin rashes, constipation, diarrhoea, ulcers, cramps, period pains, mental confusion, lack of concentration, intestinal bloating, migraines, rheumatoid arthritis, eye irritations, swelling of the body, incontinence, epileptic fits, flushes and chills, hypoglycaemia, premenstrual tension, ulcerative colitis, insomnia, sexual impotence, depression, hyperactivity, aggression, schizophrenia, numbness in the extremities, excessive hunger, twitching, and nausea - just to name a few!
Added to this are the proven bad health effects of excessive noise, lack of sleep, and various sources of stress which are results of wealth. In addition, the decline in the emotional and social quality of life which riches cause brings a corresponding increase in psycho-physical and psychological illness.
When you add to that the high proportion of harmful chemicals in and on the foods that the rich eat, the conclusion that the poor are often much better off nutritionally than the rich is inescapable.
It has also been shown that the easy life is not a healthy life. People who are freed from hard physical labour suffer from a number of health problems caused by lack of physical exercise. Hoeing or pounding maize is a healthier form of labour than working in an office. Walking or riding a bicycle is healthier than driving a car or riding a bus. Rich people can and sometimes do overcome this disadvantage by jogging or other physical exercises. But these pursuits are unproductive and time-consuming - inherently inferior to actual physical labour.
After all, isn't "running around in circles" a phrase which means doing something useless and stupid?
Whether it's a gain to have a longer, but more sickly, life, I leave for you to decide, but I'm inclined to think it isn't. For me the quality of life is more important than its quantity.
It's important, also, to bear in mind that physical health simply is not as essential for the good life as most wealthy people, especially Americans, suppose. An environment which makes you healthier physically, but sicker emotionally and spiritually is, on the balance, not an advantage at all.
Even taking into account the advantages of a life of luxury, we can see that it is on the balance destructive to our well-being. It looks good on the outside, but inside the story is different. Chikomekome cha nkhuyu mkati muli nyerere!
The gospel of money (or Mammonism) - the belief that getting richer helps people to experience the good life - is false. It is also winning the battle for people's allegiance.
The beliefs of most Christians, even the most dedicated are influenced and tainted by it. There are even Christians who proclaim that if you're not rich you haven't enough faith. Mammonism is sweeping the world, borne by the prestige of western culture. It is damaging people's lives and causing physical, emotional, spiritual, social and moral breakdown almost everywhere.
How can you prevent it from damaging your life? That's the subject of the next section of this book.
Let's take weddings, for example. This is an area of very practical problems for many people in Malawi today. If a young couple are planning a wedding, what is evil luxury and what is necessary expense?
Strictly speaking, nothing is necessary for a Christian wedding but the presence of God,the couple and witnesses ( the parents or ankhoswe). On the other hand, a marriage will be stronger if the couple and both families feel that they have been "properly" 3}married. This means that a couple's desire to spend no more than necessary has to be tempered by the felt needs of the family. Although a wedding cake, for example, has no religious or spiritual significance whatsoever and is merely an old pagan European custom originally meant as magic to ensure fertility, to refuse to have one might easily cause more confusion and ill-feeling than it is worth.
Invitation cards, wedding dresses, large numbers of attendants and children and so on have no real value in a wedding except as competitive displays of wealth, and so would seem to be obvious candidates for elimination by those wishing to live in poorness. But still, since they are seen as important by many, their absence or elimination can be the source of damaged relationships.
Each situation has to be dealt with individually.
I am only going to offer suggestions. The last thing the world I want to do is to lay a further burden of law and guilt on rich Christians. Most of those I know in Malawi, at least, are already convicted, overburdened, and uneasy, and I want to help them out of that situation, not dig them in deeper.
As in all addictions, we will be more vulnerable to luxury addiction if our relationship with God is bad. If we feel condemned and outside his love, we will try to compensate for that by buying things (as well as acting in other destructive ways) and begin an endless cycle of defeat.
I have outlined what I believe to be God's calling for us concerning riches in most uncompromising terms because I think the times demand urgency, and because I think we do ourselves no service if we obscure the imperatives of holiness. If the rich carry on living in luxury, there's not much time left for any of us, rich or poor. And a watered-down gospel has no power to save.
But alongside God's call to absolute holiness is his absolute love and forgiveness. Either one without the other is a monstrosity. God does not demand perfect holiness, but calls us to it. Responding to that call results in a fantastic adventure of progress towards holiness, but in no way ensures perfect success at being holy.
When Paul says that he has learned to be content with whatever he has, he is expressing exactly the attitude we are seeking. In Chapter 5, when I was criticising rich Christians' use of that passage in Philippians, it was because they use it as a cop out. It wasn't the idea I was criticising, but the misuse of it.
If rich Christians are to be content with what they have, however, then it mustn't be a false or deceptive contentment based on an ignorance or a deliberate disregard of the facts. Rich Christians should know very clearly that if they live luxuriously they are injuring, cheating and stealing from other people. They should know that they are causing others to fall into sin. They should know that God condemns the way they live.
If they know all that, and are content, then it can only be a contentment based on a knowledge of God's forgiveness and on a knowledge that they are doing what they are able to do with God's help to bring their addiction under control and are becoming less rich. A contentment based on anything else is a deception and is working for their damnation through deliberate sin and seduction by Mammon.
A couple of years after my encounter with God, my wife, Lesley, suggested that we should tithe - that is, give away 1 out of every 10 Kwacha we earned. Now I didn't, and still don't, believe that tithing is a law laid on Christians, any more than I think the law of equal revenge is. I think the emphasis on tithing today comes from church leaders' desire for cash and from rich Christians' desire to feel good about giving much less than God wants them to more than from the moving of God.
I knew, however, that God was calling Lesley and me to tithe at that time, and that Lesley was right. But I was scared to death. We were living on the very edge of our income - just getting by with a struggle. How could we just throw away 10%? So I reacted angrily, told Lesley not to be stupid, and refused to consider doing it. That lasted for a couple of months as God let me dangle, slowly turning in the wind, until I couldn't stand it any longer, decided that God meant what He said in other ways so He might actually take care of us if we were willing to risk it, and agreed to "give it a trial".
From that moment on, there has never been a struggle to make ends meet. In some cases that's because needed funds arrived unexpectedly from astounding sources. More often, it was because some things we used to think were important stopped being important to us. Both are ways in which God provides for our needs. He provides for our real needs and changes our attitude towards the things we think are needs but are only greeds. I wanted to be shown, and God showed me. So, for a while, I was content.
But for us, as I believe to be true for all rich Christians, God's call to tithing was just an intermediate step. He was preparing us for more.
So God began the calling again. "What are you doing spending all that money on insurance - burglary and accident. Don't you trust me? " "Oh, come on, Lord, what would I do if my computer was stolen? I certainly can't replace it and I need it!" "Don't you trust me?" "Lord, of course I trust you, but it's scary to be without insurance." "OK, I'll wait. When you're ready to really trust me, drop the insurance." So after a few months, I did.
Now God's calling me to sell my motorbike and get a pushbike instead. He's been doing that for a year or so, and I've managed to do half of it. I've bought the pushbike, but haven't sold the motorbike.(Since this was written the motorbike has gone to Karonga with its new owner.) "OK, Lord, I'm having to learn how to ride the pushbike all over again. After all, I've not been on one for 45 years! When I'm confident, I'll ride it to work ... or at least to the Post Office. After all, you wouldn't want me to fall over on the highway, would you?" "OK, when you trust me enough, ride the bike. "
You see how it goes? Step by step, step by step. God at our elbows, loving us. Otherwise the whole thing's impossible. For luxury addicts, the narrow territory between riches and poverty has God in it; otherwise it doesn't exist, and we have to live in one or the other. ( And naturally most of us, if we have a choice, choose riches!)
Many have gone through the trauma of being ripped out of emotionally secure environments to be thrown into a frightening and confusing new world of boarding school. They have suffered alienation from childhood friends, beliefs, family, and for many the further emotional strains of overseas training, with the force it has to alienate them from whatever emotional roots they might still have. They have postponed marriage and suffered either the stress of a denied sexuality or the experience of the degraded sexuality of promiscuity.
To accept that in some degree all this trauma and sacrifice was wrong-headed and mistaken is in itself very traumatic and frightening. It would not be surprising if only a few managed it.
All this is easier, of course, if you have known very unhappy rich people, as I have. I am reminded of a woman who used to live on an estate in Malawi. (A real person, but with the details shifted to protect her privacy.)
She was tremendously wealthy and lived in a huge house with every comfort and convenience, a platoon of servants, and a swimming pool. The surroundings were magnificently beautiful and her garden and domestic animals supplied fruits and flowers, milk, eggs and different meats. I said to her once, "You live in a paradise." and she replied, "What good is a paradise when you have no one to share it with?"
Her relationship with her husband was strained for a number of reasons, partly because he was interested only in his work. ( Work addiction is common in rich men - partly because of their need to support a luxurious lifestyle, partly because of false beliefs about luxury and addiction to it, partly because of the need which all people have to feel useful.) Certainly he was not giving her the emotional support and affection she needed. Her children were grown or in boarding school far away. The vast lands around her house made it difficult for her to have close relationships with other rich women in the area. And anyway, her culture strongly discouraged honest communication about personal matters.
Her wealth divided her from the poor, and the social and racial pressures of the estate community made it impossible for her to do anything useful for them. Her servants did the bulk of the work which might have made her feel occupied and fulfilled. The knowledge that she was, in fact, important to no one, and of use to very few ate into her peace, and destroyed her self-confidence.
Accurate observation made her aware that her selfish and luxurious lifestyle made the poor around her into enemies. Her guilt about that exaggerated it and inclined her to paranoid fears and suspicions towards them, making impossible close relationships with the people who worked with her in the house and garden. She was uneasy, frustrated, bored and lonely.
She was, in fact, living a life of desperation in the midst of plenty. And she was only one of a number of similar people I have known. The details vary, but the pattern remains remarkably uniform. Riches trap people and bind them as much as poverty does. The possession of many things definitely does not make people happy.
Our refusal to put our trust in things, moreover, has to go very deep. We have to allow for the possibility, for instance, that God knows that our greatest need is to starve to death or die of cancer, or to be fried on a griddle as some martyrs were. I agree that such decisions on God's part may be exceptional, but such experiences have always been part of the lives of some radically dedicated Christians.
Probably most of them are the result of God's desire to give us the joy of showing his power in our lives, which is best done in weakness and adversity. In Greek, after all, the word for witness and martyr are the same. I am reminded of a woman in England who had a serious debilitating and paralysing disease who was prayed for for healing and did not receive physical healing, but instead the complete release from bitterness and alienation. She declared herself 95% healed and was a wonderful witness to God's peace and joy in the midst of illness.
But be that as it may, the point is that if we put our faith in a kind of material triumphalism, we will sooner or later be proven wrong. God's priorities are spiritual, and if material well-being conflicts with his perfect plan for us, it can disappear.
The result of the behaviour God condemns is to hinder, or break good relationships with him and with other people. That is why God condemns it. The purpose of the forgiveness Jesus made possible, and the forgiveness recommended to us by Jesus is to restore the good relationships which have been destroyed.
In fact the connection between bad relationships and luxury addiction works both ways. When we feel lonely, isolated, depressed and cut off, we very often fall, if we have the funds to do so, into a kind of compulsive buying, trying to compensate. One of the reasons luxury addiction is so common in the U.S. is the general decline in the quality of relationships. Buying something does make us feel better very temporarily. But, unfortunately, buying things makes relationships worse in the long run, so although it makes us feel temporarily better, it, makes us permanently worse off.
If we wish to live in poorness successfully, we must always make good relationships more important than things. This change in our attitude will both make it easier to do without things, and help us to see and appreciate the benefits of poorness, and of the lavish giving and so on which go along with our poorness adventure.
Let's suppose that a husband or a wife has an opportunity to go abroad for further studies, but the funds do not permit the spouse to go as well. The further study will make the couple richer, but if it is more than a few months long, it will put an enormous strain on the marriage and on the family. The travelling person will come back very different - a stranger. He or she will have new knowledge, new habits, new ideas and new values which the remaining person doesn't share.
While apart the couple, given today's attitudes about sexuality, will be unlikely to remain faithful to each other sexually. Each will be lonely and thus exposed to the temptation of forming too close relationships outside the marriage. The children will almost certainly be neglected and at the very least will suffer from the kinds of emotional trauma and stunting caused by being brought up in a single-parent family.
A couple who know the value of relationships will look at the balance of added wealth against damaged relationships and probably choose not to take up the opportunity.
Or suppose a husband is transferred to a town where the wife cannot find employment. A couple with relationships high on their list of priorities will decide for the husband to resign or for the wife to remain a housewife rather than live separately.
Or, again, a couple put under economic strain by the presence of large numbers of dependents will try to work out solutions to the problem which do not cause damage to the family relationships - working out ways in which the dependents can do business to contribute to their own support, for instance - rather than tossing out the dependents, or bearing with them full of resentment.
Modern or western culture is thoroughly project oriented. People from it are inclined to evaluate themselves and other people according to the amount accomplished. ( If, that is they don't evaluate themselves and other people totally according to the amount earned.)
Expatriates coming to Malawi, for instance, almost always experience considerable frustration because things simply cannot be done as rapidly as they can be done in the United States or Europe. Everything such as getting permits, buying postage stamps, moving from place to place and so on takes longer. Having come for a short time, with a set agenda, they find that their goals are impossible to reach.
Often this frustration goads them into being thoroughly unpleasant people: impatient, bad-tempered, arrogant, whining and judgemental individuals.
Being poor does mean that things happen more slowly. Going by public transport or on foot takes longer than driving your own car. Writing things on a computer is faster than writing them on a typewriter. The number of places visited or the number of words put down on the page in a day will be fewer if we are poor than if we are rich. If we accept modern priorities and values in our lives, our attempt to be poor will be frustrating and we may well slip into the same sort of unpleasant and destructive habits of thought and speech described above.
Partly this is off-set, however, if we accept that greeting people, chatting with them, making personal connections and strengthening communal ties of various sorts, reflection and self-evaluation are in themselves just as important goals as more materialistic accomplishments.
Then, if we find our lives becoming more complicated than we can handle gracefully, we will cut down on the projects rather than the relation-building activities.
We need also to adopt the biblical perspective that being is more important than doing. In God's eyes, the sort of person we have managed to be in any day is more important than how many projects we've finished. The fruits of the Spirit, for instance, do not include efficiency, or dynamism. And certainly, if our drive to do things prevents us from demonstrating such qualities as peace, joy, patience, kindness, trustfulness and the like, we have lost much more than we have gained.
In other words, quality is more important than quantity, If we make a first priority of "saving time" the time we save is unlikely to be as constructively used as the time we thought we were wasting.
Another idea that we will need to reject is that only activity which produces financial or material profit is "work". Shortly before her death, my wife gave up teaching and devoted herself full-time to a variety of other activities such as painting, running the Sunday School, and leading Bible Studies, none of which brought in any money. Suddenly she discovered that people felt that she had stopped "working". Actually, she was working just as hard or harder than ever. What had changed was the benefit her work achieved; it had become spiritual, social and emotional instead of material.
One of the ways modern culture degrades women is by not giving child-raising and home-making their true value as extremely important activities. In fact, although they do not bring in money, there are no other activities more important for the well-being of humanity. They are also very hard work requiring high skills.
One of the criticisms which will be levelled against what I am saying is that unless people work for their own material benefit, they will be "lazy". This attitude is mistaken on two counts. In the first place, I am not recommending that people stop working for material gain, only that they stop working entirely for their own material gain. In the second place, I am recommending that they work much much harder for their social, emotional and spiritual benefit. Breaking a luxury addiction, for instance, is very hard work. Responsible giving of material resources (instead of just throwing money at a problem) is very hard work. Sacrificial giving of one's emotional resources - that is, loving those who are hard to love - is the hardest work of all. Achieving poorness is definitely not for the lazy.
When we understand that worldly power corrupts, then we can regard it a blessing to be powerless. When the dominating values, the mainstream of our society, is corrupt and evil, then it is a blessing to be marginalised. In an arena in which only worshippers of Mammon (or money) can be victors, then it is more blessed to be a victim.
I know by long and bitter personal experience it's easier to say these things than to live them. Easier by far. But to some degree, we must take on these attitudes if we are to live successfully in today's world as poor people. Reforming our attitudes is a basic step in trying to reform our behaviour.
And that brings me to the final attitude of mind which I think is important, and that is the acceptance that we, and others like us are indeed addicts. As Alcoholics Anonymous discovered long ago, addiction can best be fought by people who know they are addicts.
Without God's help, we and other addicts cannot win. If we can hold on to this knowledge it will make it possible to avoid both self-condemnation and condemnation of others.
Most rich people, and other addicts like alcoholics, are not just wilfully selfish and self-indulgent. They are victims of cravings too strong for them to deal with. They are to be pitied, not condemned, loved and helped, not simply criticised.
Having laid a foundation of communion with God, the next practical step, I think, is to concentrate on our expenditure rather than our income. For the luxury addict, poorness is more a matter of expenditure than it is of income.
Generally speaking, then, hard questions about where our money comes from and whether it's generated in ways that God recommends or condemns can wait until our expenditure begins to take on poorness patterns. ( Assuming, that is, God isn't convicting you of sinful acquisition of wealth. If he is, do what He says, not what I say!)
The general principle is that the more we have, the more God expects us to give away. For rich Christians, tithing is a cop out. They can give a tenth of their income without even noticing it go. For a Christian with a very small income, tithing involves serious sacrifices. Is that fair? No, not at all. That is why it is an inadequate standard for Christian giving.
God meant the tithing laws to prepare people for the further revelation of Jesus that God's people give and give until it hurts, and then give more. The New Testament "law" of giving is to give what God gives you the strength to give, increasing the giving as you are enabled by God until you are living in poorness. To think in amounts misses the real point, which is whether or not you are receiving and conveying the blessings which God wants to achieve through our giving. Different situations require different amounts of giving.
There is a description of the early church which is worth quoting here, because it shows how radically the first Christians gave. Writing about 125 AD, Aristides has the following to say about them:
They walk in all humility and kindness, and falsehood is not found among them, and they love one another. They despise not the widow, and grieve not the orphan. He that hath, distributeth liberally to him that hath not. If they see a stranger, they bring him under their roof, and rejoice over him as it were their own brother: for they call themselves brethren, not after the flesh, but after the spirit and in God; but when one of the poor passes away from the world, and any of them see him, then he provides for his burial according to his ability; and if they hear that any of their number is imprisoned or oppressed for the name of their Messiah, all of them provide for his needs, and if it is possible that he may be delivered, they deliver him. And if there is among them a man that is poor and needy, and they have not an abundance of necessaries, they fast two or three days that they may supply the needy with their necessary food.
What you give to is equally dependent on what God tells you. If you feel moved to give to a church, that's fine. But don't be bullied into it by a pastor squeezing and manipulating you. What you want to support is the building or extension of God's Kingdom. But that work is not confined to churches. Sometimes it is completely absent in a church. If you don't think a church is building the Kingdom, don't give much to it. You might prefer to support a social action group, a charity, an environmental action group, or whatever group you feel is working within the thrust of God's will. You might want to use the money to provide hospitality, print tracts, build a bridge in a rural area, support the work of a missionary, throw parties for beggars, or a love feast for the church down the road ... or whatever God suggests to you. If the giving does not cause you to rejoice, then you're giving to the wrong things.
Unfortunately, though, there are very serious problems involved with giving large amounts of money away. One has to be very careful. I certainly don't have all the answers about this. But I think that many, if not most of the problems, can be avoided if you make a practice of giving only in situations where there is a chain of personal relationships, love and concern between you and the ultimate recipients of your giving. If there are love-ties between you and the immediate recipient, and that person gives to people with whom he has a similar personal relationship, and so on, a lot of the things that go wrong in much of today's charitable giving will not go wrong.
If you follow this principle, it will have the effect of limiting your giving to relatively small projects and small organisations, which is beneficial. In giving, small is beautiful, because small amounts do not have the same corrupting effect as large ones. And because money is as scripture says, tainted, gifts of personnel and material are better than gifts of money. For rich people to throw money at far-away problems is cheap giving, with a significant element of irresponsibility, which probably explains why it so often goes wrong.
In giving, as in anything else, a priority needs to be placed on the creation of high-quality relationships. If the relationships are deep, loving, mutually sacrificial, then there is a framework in which material gifts of great worth are not destructive. This means that the best sort of giving is the giving of your time, concern, energy and talents for the purpose of establishing such relationships.
That kind of giving is very costly in material resources, but also in emotional and spiritual resources. That's probably why it is rather rare.
But still, I know, there are huge problems. How does a poor person in Malawi, for example, give sacrificially and effectively so that rich people in England can learn the secrets of being poor without experiencing poverty - one of the most valuable and most needed sorts of giving possible today ? Does he just set off on foot without a purse or a change of clothes, as Jesus advised his disciples? Perhaps someone could write a book with the answers, but I don't have them to write down.
Nevertheless, the existence of problems is no excuse for abandoning giving.
To progress further in our struggle against luxury addiction, it is also necessary to take practical steps to protect ourselves against temptation. One of the most important of such protections today is to train oneself not to look at or listen to advertisements. Advertising is the equivalent of drug pushing. It's designed to create luxury addicts for the benefit of those selling the addictive substances.
Drug-pushing is a serious crime in most countries and most people consider the drug-pusher to be a particularly evil person. We should feel the same way about many advertisers who use manipulative techniques for the marketing of material goods, but we don't. And it is unlikely that our governments are going to give us any protection against this evil, though in some places there are laws to ensure that these luxury pushers at least don't tell us outright lies about their products, which is equivalent to prohibiting the sale of drugs that have been corrupted by foreign substances (a little protection, but not much!).
Advertising is also allied to pornography - designed to increase artificially desires and hungers the satisfying of which is often destructive to the quality of life and the well-being of the people affected. Like pornography, it exploits people's weaknesses for gain.
So, we must guard against it. It helps to remember that even if the advertisement tells the truth about the product it is advertising, it is still proclaiming the lie that possessions are important for happiness. Why listen to lies if we don't have to?
In any case, anyone with self-respect will prefer to make up his own mind about whether or not he is satisfied with what he has, and not let himself be affected by artificially induced desires and attitudes.
Another way of protecting ourselves is to limit our exposure to rich people. If we generally cluster with people of a level of poorness similar to our own, we will have less temptation to be jealous, and will come in contact with fewer objects to develop a desire for. Of course, I'm not suggesting anything rigid or laying down a law. And, of course, just as our obligation to reach out to drunkards or drug addicts leads us to fellowship with them to the limits of our own abilities to remain uncorrupted, so it should be with rich people. They, too, desperately need the presence of God in their lives so that they can be set free. And we have an obligation to try to help them. But people who habitually seek the company and regard of the rich usually end up with a heavy luxury addiction.
Window shopping, and pouring over catalogues are other things it is best to avoid. What is the point of disturbing our peace by seeking out attractive things which we didn't think of wanting until we saw them? Why gaze longingly at things which we want but can't afford and shouldn't buy? It doesn't make very good sense.
Along the same lines, I have found that there are certain luxury shops in Blantyre which I need to avoid if I can, because I will want what's inside them if I see it. It seems to make sense not to subject oneself to temptations unless there's a good reason to do so.
But if we are going to give lavishly, profligately, sacrificially, we have actually to spend less on ourselves, right? That involves a lot of difficult decisions. Distinguishing between needs and greeds is not always easy. in fact it's almost never easy.
What is necessary for us? Strictly and broadly speaking nothing which somebody else in the world is living contentedly without is necessary for us. If he doesn't need it, we don't need it. ( Obviously, I'm speaking very broadly. A person in Alaska needs heating and a person in Accra doesn't, of course. But if the person in Accra can live happily with a house temperature of 95oF. or a person in Nepal with a house temperature of 45oF, then so can the person in Alaska or Arizona. And if a person in Karonga can sleep on the floor, so can a person in the U.S.)
But true as that is, it doesn't take into account a whole complex of factors which influence the way we feel, or the way other people feel about us. Each of us has a particular culture, a particular personality, a particular background, and so on. What one person feels hardship lacking, another person feels hardship having. The minimum obligatory clothing in Mangochi is different from the obligatory minimum in an office in Blantyre. And so on.
One of the best features of our covenant with God is that He deals with us as individuals and doesn't expect a deadening uniformity. What constitutes poorness for me is not exactly the same as what constitutes poorness for you. For these reasons, in attempting to give guidance in how to experience poorness, I can only suggest areas for you to examine closely. If you are genuinely searching for God's will for you, he will, at each step in the process, convict you of sin regarding certain possessions or certain expenditures.
A word of caution, though. This is one area where a husband's headship must not be exercised in a dictatorial way, and a wife should not bully her husband into compliance. A family should not embark on breaking their luxury addiction unless they can both do so willingly, if not wholeheartedly. Poorness cannot be achieved by coercion.
Here are some of the areas you should look at.
Individual transport is a major factor in riches. The use of large cars unnecessarily is the single biggest factor in the selfish consumption of non-renewable sources of energy and in pollution. It is also a major factor isolating people and in creating resentment and jealousy in the poor. It is furthermore, in Malawi almost certain to be the largest single expenditure an individual has. So, it's an obvious place to begin our examination of lifestyle.
The first two disadvantages of personal car use are obvious. The last two may need some explanation. Driving a car isolates us by removing the possibility of meaningful human contacts with people we meet as we travel. Often we don't see even our closest friends as we rush past them. If we do see them, it is difficult to do more than wave as we go by. Only if there is important business do we stop and indulge in conversation. And, of course, we totally ignore other pedestrians, unless they get in our way, in which case we hoot at them rudely.
Not only do we fail to greet people, but we pour poisonous fumes in their faces, deafen them with the noise we make, and all too often shower them with dust or muddy water. That is not the way good relationships are built!
Only those who have had the experience of walking, hitch-hiking, or biking along our highways know how hard it is to feel love and forgiveness for those who rush heedlessly past, treating one like scum, ignoring one's need for transport and so on. It is easy, in fact, to hate. Driving an empty car, particularly, without compelling reasons along a road lined with walking people is an act of arrogance and selfishness. Already as the gap between the rich and the poor in Malawi grows, I have noticed the beginning and now the increase in actual angry action - rude words, gestures and even rock-throwing - against those in cars.
It is spiritually, emotionally, physically, socially and environmentally sounder to use public transport than to drive a car, to ride a push bike than to use public transport and to walk than to ride a push bike. Each step towards walking is less isolating, healthier, uses fewer resources, and causes less pollution than the next more industrialised transport.
At the same time, I am painfully aware that my own life and ministry would be impossible as presently constituted without a car. Whether I would gain or lose more by giving up my car is debateable, and I debate it endlessly. Certainly it would require very major changes in the whole pattern of my life, and for the moment God is not urging me - or, at least not urging me firmly enough - to give it up. And I know many others are in the same position. Many life patterns which have developed since the coming of private motorized transport are dependant on it and it would be very difficult in many cases to revise them completely.
Besides, individual transport can be used in ways which provide badly-needed assistance to other people.
However, if you do not have a car, you should think carefully before buying one. When people with moderate incomes buy a car, it almost always becomes a major burden, requiring very large amounts of time and money if it is to be kept going. Many people are led into spending a major portion of their resources - money, time and attention on it - resources that would better be spent on their families, perhaps, or on relationship-building activities.
If you feel you must have a car, you should buy the smallest one which will do what you require. On the other hand, newer cars are actually cheaper to run and avoid the inflated costs of spare parts. So it makes sense to buy as new a car as possible without straining your budget. You might consider spending extra money on reliability and durability, but should not do so for style, power or prestige.
If you have a car, you should use it only when the situation requires it, when there is no time to take a bus, for instance, or when our destination is too far. (Of course, you should be aware that the distance that is "too far" to walk gets shorter and shorter the less you walk, so you need consciously to be expanding rather than shrinking our idea of what is "close enough".)
If you have a car, you should seek ways to use it for the benefit of others. You should try never to drive with the car empty, for instance. Picking people up eliminates some of the bad effects of driving a car and particularly encourages the kind of relationships which make you happy. ( I am assuming, of course, that you are not charging money.) The minor amounts of time lost are more than compensated by the fellowship en route and the smiles, and often prayers, at the passengers' destinations, and a boring journey can be turned into an adventure of discovery as we learn about the people we have met.
This process has difficulties for expatriates. For many there are communication difficulties, and the poorest people are often afraid to get into an expatriate's car. A bit of language learning, and experience can help overcome these difficulties.
I have recently been acting on my increasing conviction that giving lifts is important, and can relate from experience that it has enriched my life and been beneficial in every way. I have gradually moved from doing it reluctantly as a duty, to feeling injured if I have to drive any substantial distance alone.
Finally, every person with a car should voluntarily do without it for a week or two every year to resensitise himself to what life is like on foot. Hitch-hiking is especially therapeutic, for it reminds you that every time we unnecessarily ignore a hitch-hiker, we have unnecessarily increased the resentment in the world.
Cars and car use are really a central factor in achieving poorness. Without getting our lust for automotive luxury under control, we will not get very far along the way.
After transport, food and clothing are usually major expenditures, and are also areas where luxury often has bad physical, social and spiritual effects.
In considering what we buy to eat and drink, we should remember that luxurious eating hinders close fellowship in a number of ways and that simpler diets are generally healthier than rich diets. If we can accustom ourselves to eating mostly basic foods, we will benefit both socially and physically.
Processed foods such as potato chips, and corn curls, are generally a waste of money, being poor in nutrition and high in cost. They increase our expenditure without producing a gain in health or energy. Buying fresh vegetables and fruit is better in every way than buying tinned vegetables and fruit; growing them is better still. One favourite wasteful expenditure here is to buy fanta, coke and other forms of sweetened, flavoured water. Plain water is healthier and much cheaper. If we must have sweetened drinks, sweetened tea is the most economical.
And, for many people, various forms of beer, wine and distilled spirits are a major expenditure. If we cut down or eliminate our consumption of them, we will liberate surprisingly large amounts of money for better uses.
Luxurious dressing is a prime cause of alienation and jealousy, pushing poor people into poverty. Different jobs and environments require different levels of dress, but generally we should limit ourselves to the simplest and most economical clothes we can get away with. It is possible to look "smart" without spending large sums of money on luxurious fabrics and fashionable styles.
This is an area where it is difficult to resist the temptation to compete. It was an area where early Christians were just as vulnerable as we are, so that Peter had to speak very sharply against over-dressing and over-adornment.
I don't think that Peter meant to establish a law against braided hair or gold jewellery as such, but to counsel against ostentation and competition in dress. It is not necessary for a Christian to dress in rags to live in poorness. On the other hand, we should not be ashamed to wear things until they are no longer serviceable, or to resort to repairs when necessary. When we're not at work, at the very least, we can regard patches as badges of honour and be proud of them.One of the evil developments of the modern world, equivalent to advertising, is the rapid change in fashions, encouraged by the clothing industry to induce people to buy more clothes than they need. To buy clothes simply because they are a new fashion, or to discard clothes because they are "out of fashion" is to participate in the worst sort of luxurious dressing, and to allow oneself to be a dupe of the fashion industry.
This doesn't mean, of course, that it is wrong to buy a fashionable dress, so long as one needs a dress, and is prepared to go on wearing it until it is worn out, or at the very least to give it to someone who needs it when one is tired of it.
Furthermore, we need to control the number of clothes we own as well as the luxuriousness of them. Anyone with more than, say, half-a-dozen of any particular item of clothing should seriously consider giving some away, or not replacing some when they are worn out.
The use of various cosmetics and hair products, and the adopting of certain hair styles raises similar questions as the wearing of certain types of clothes. It is not that such things are evil. But we should ask ourselves if the money we spend on them could not be better used in other ways.
Housing is another area of major expense for most people, and an area where temptation to luxury is strong. The usual principles apply in this area - buy only what we need, and avoid ostentation or display. There is no need to be uncomfortable or cramped just to achieve poorness. On the other hand, we should avoid having more furniture than we need or having furniture which takes up more space and material than necessary for its purpose. The current fashion for very large chairs and sofas with huge arms etc. is a fashion for those who want to declare to their friends, "See, I am now rich."
This is also an area where generous sharing is possible. If we have more space than we need and are unable or are unwilling to move into smaller quarters, we should share our accommodation as lavishly and as sacrificially as we can. In this way, we can turn a liability into something of an advantage.
In Malawi, where housing is very often supplied by the company, problems arise. Whatever housing is supplied does not affect our spending or giving, so is not a disadvantage in that way. On the other hand, it can accustom us to luxury in a way that is addicting and can cause envy and luxury addiction in others. On the other hand, to refuse to occupy a house considered suitable for your job level can cause serious confusions within the staff and is not likely to be taken kindly by the management. Are such confusions bad or good? Would the witness of such an act be worth the problems? Everybody must decide for themselves.
Appliances and other machines are another area of strong temptation for modern Christians, and can easily destroy one's poorness if one isn't strong and disciplined. But making decisions about any particular machine is not at all easy. Generally speaking, a machine is good if it frees a person from work which would otherwise interfere with their good relationships , if it makes better work possible, or if it makes possible constructive and satisfying activity which would otherwise be impossible. Any gains of this sort, however, have to be measured against the destructive effects which ownership of any machine has - the time and space it will occupy, the money its maintenance will require, and the power it has to create dependency..
No one should buy a machine merely to avoid physical labour or when the same work could instead be done by a person - either a member of the family or a hired worker. Physical labour is good, not bad, and people need to have jobs, either for their own satisfaction or for the income they produce. It is better to have our house and garden, office or factory, full of people than full of machines, because then we are helping others and providing opportunities for meaningful relationships. Everyone should avoid machines which isolate them from communication with others, such as videos and computers, and carefully control their use of them if they have them.
I don't in any way want to suggest that I have made all the right decisions or that others should make the same ones. I'm very aware of my compromises and failures of will in this area. But, perhaps sharing some of my own situation will help to illustrate the kinds of decisions that need to be made.
I have a tape deck to play music because that is something that no person could provide for me in the same variety, ( And, besides, I can't contemplate being entirely without, say, orchestral music - though at Likwenu we lived mostly so because there was electricity only 4 hours a day.) I also have a computer, which was given to me, because it enables me to do several useful things I couldn't otherwise do. ( And because I succumbed to temptation and advertising.) I refuse, however, to play computer games, preferring more useful and less isolating occupations. ( That makes me feel better, but I know it's a cheap compromise.)
I have a blender (or liquidizer) because it does things impossible to do without it and it saves money, but don't have a food processor or electric food mixer because the work they do can be done by human skill and muscle power. I have a duplicating machine because it produces the materials I need in my work, but operate it manually, since there is no reason except laziness for using electricity to do a job I can easily do with my muscles.
On the other hand, I'm ashamed to tell you how much space I reserve for my personal use, though I do try to share it generously. But as I've already said, I'm an addict.
All the foregoing remarks about what to buy and what not to buy display all the problems of trying to make definite laws in this area. Both readers with much smaller incomes than mine and those with incomes much larger than mine have most likely found the advice amusing. Perhaps there is no chance of your ever buying a car or a liquidizer, for instance. That's good. Praise the Lord that you're closer to real poorness than I am. But don't let that blind you to your need to make similar choices to the ones I suggest as you contemplate buying the things that represent for you a step toward luxury. .
For many people, a major conflict arises concerning their children. Is it right to deny our children things which other children have just because of a principle? What about schooling? Would it be right to send children to an inferior local school when one could afford to send them to a private school of some sort?
These are not easy decisions to make. It's one thing to give up things for oneself; it's another to make decisions for other people. However, there are some guiding principles.
In the first place, children need our attention, love and companionship more than they need any thing. If our desire for expensive schooling, toys, clothes etc. for our children is our motivation for both parents working outside the home, then we are doing our children a disservice and giving them a disadvantage in life, not an advantage. Nothing is more valuable to children than the companionship and security that the continual attendance of a parent gives them. That should not be sacrificed for anything except for absolute necessities.
In the second place, training in the importance of and the achievement of poorness, together with the habits developed by living in poorness, are more valuable than expensive schooling. Parents usually want expensive schooling for their children to ensure that the child achieves "the good life" through a high income, which is a false value altogether.
Although many modern people would deny it, I think it is right to assume that parents generally know better than their children what is best for their children. Children are naturally very susceptible to luxury propaganda and to the prevailing luxury addiction around them. Just as parents would not feel guilty about preventing a child from playing with fire, they should not feel guilty denying a child things which the child would be better without.
If the communication is good between the parents and their children concerning their voluntary poorness, then the childrens' lack of things which other children have can be a source of satisfaction rather than stress. At least that's what my own children have reported.
When my elder daughter was 12, after 8 years of living in poorness, she spent one school term in an American school and was asked to cut out pictures from magazines and arrange them to make a large picture that showed the real meaning of America. My daughter's creation was composed entirely of machines of various sorts, and the comment was not intended to be complimentary. She had grown up in poorness and already considered it superior.
Often, too, the lack of things to play with turn children toward creative and human-oriented activities, which are much better for them. My children grew up with very few toys, and as a result enjoy being creative. We all learned to entertain ourselves reading, doing various crafts and arts, such as playing instruments and singing together, observing and studying our surroundings and most of all to enjoy talking with each other and other people. We didn't do this out of conviction, but out of necessity, but the results, together with my observation of children who have grown up in riches, have convinced me that we were very lucky.
And, children present another sort of problem for those seeking poorness. Given the overcrowding of the world, having more than two children has an element of selfishness in it. In order to protect our old age, or to increase our status, to ensure that we're remembered as living dead, or even just to gain the pleasure that children can be, we will be consuming more resources, occupying more land and generally contributing to the suffering of everyone, our children included. Couples need to look at this problem very carefully and make responsible decisions about it.
The whole question of insurance is a difficult one, too. In any case, it is impossible to avoid it completely if you own a car, since the insurance companies have succeeded in making some types of insurance a legal requirement.
My own conviction that I should avoid buying insurance wherever possible came from my realisation of how the business forced (or at least encouraged) people to be aggressive and dishonest. The insurance company does everything it can to trick people into claiming or accepting less than they're entitled to. This is routine. It is often necessary to threaten legal action to convince the company that we will not be bullied. If we're meek, we will be preyed upon.
In addition, and as a result, most claimants try to claim more than they're entitled to, assuming, quite rightly, that they will in the end be awarded a fraction of what they claim. If we claim honestly, we will not be believed.
Any claim then becomes a contest of will and trickery - not at all the sort of situation Christians should willingly get themselves into. And any procedure which always tends to have that sort of result must not be within God's will. There has to be sin in it somewhere.
And anyway, if we look at insurance buildings all over the world, they are always among the most luxurious and palatial. Clearly insurance companies have been making very large profits. Why not consider putting the amount of insurance premiums in the bank every year if you can't trust God's provenance completely? Then they are available to you to give away when God moves you to do so. And after all, what's trust in God for if it isn't to give us peace about the future?
Another area to be looked at carefully is holidays. Holidays are a perfect example of how yesterday's luxuries become today's necessities. Holidays are, in fact, a very recent invention. Until near the end of the last century, even two weeks off a year was very unusual. And certainly there was no thought that one's holiday must involve a trip to a different place.
Today, in the United States, at least, to go somewhere "on holiday" is not only a necessity, but almost an obligation. ( Like wearing shoes, for instance.) And people often arrive back at work more exhausted than they left because of the emotional and financial strains of travel and adjustment to strange environments and food etc.
Clearly, we need accept that holiday travel is not a necessity, and adjust our plans for it to reflect that and to fit our own energies and budget, and require of any holiday plans that they benefit us emotionally and socially. A leisurely visit at home may well be a much better way of spending our time and energies than seeing yet another new place.
Once again, let me emphasize that it isn't my intention to lay down rules. Your adventure with God is yours alone; mine is mine alone. What we can do cheerfully and peacefully in the way of breaking our luxury addiction and achieving poorness we should do. What we could not do without fear and bitterness, we should leave until God through the power of his Holy Spirit prepares us for doing it. If that freedom leads us into carelessness or financial licence, then we're not as radically dedicated to God as we thought we were.
Having looked at expenditure, we must now look at income. If we want to reap the benefits of poorness, then our income must be earned in ways that have God's blessing. Of course, that's true whether or not we want to achieve poorness. But it is of special significance if we're trying to break our addiction to luxury, because people usually reach for sinful income to feed a luxury habit or out of a lack of trust in God's provenance. So, our new way of thinking on the subject of riches should set us free to give such income sources up.
Probably few readers of this book make a career of theft or murder. But the same could not be said of trading dishonestly, or making unfair profits, or using one's position to reap unfair benefits. These things are very common, even among dedicated Christians.
One of the evil results of our long and heavy acceptance of foreign aid is that fraud has come to be acceptable. People have seen that most foreign aid is fraudulent - pretending to help us, but actually designed to help the donor more. ( An average of 80% of any aid money, for instance, never leaves the donor country, but is spent there to buy their products and hire their personnel.)6
People have also seen that many aid personnel are exploiting the system for their own gain, while pretending to be altruistic. Naturally this gives fraud a kind of respectability; if everybody's doing it, why not me?
For this kind of reasoning, Jesus would have only condemnation. Dishonest money brings only suffering and damnation in the long run. The Christian should give up any money-generating project which is dishonest, which depends on misrepresentation of the products or the services provided. He should make a point of doing more than the minimum required in his job, and of honouring any commitment, stated or unstated, he has made.
It is, for instance, dishonest for professionals to accept their training from primary school onwards as a gift from the government and then leave for overseas, Botswana or South Africa as soon as it's completed. It is dishonest as well to go for training which one knows to be irrelevant or useless just for the purpose of gaining an increment or a large grant to live luxuriously overseas. It's dishonest to go for training for which one knows he's not qualified.
It is dishonest to accept aid which is useless but provides large per diem allowances and travel opportunities and to allow donors to hold workshops which are not relevant or helpful. It is dishonest to use company or departmental equipment for your purposes unless it is specifically allowed for by mutual agreement.
All these and similar things are commonplace today. But that is no excuse for the Christian.
But even more than this, we need to avoid making undue profit in business or when selling things. A Christian sale is one in which both the buyer and the seller feel that they have done well, both financially and morally. We should avoid taking advantage both of ignorance on the part of the buyer and of a shortage or crisis situation to get undue prices. If our business is making extra-large profits, we should either raise the salaries of the staff, or reduce the price of our product.
High profits are almost always obtained at the expense of the poor in one way or another.
But more, even than this, if we are an owner or general manager, we should do what we can to reduce the spread between the highest-paid person on the staff and the lowest. Part of the evil that stems from riches comes from the gap between the rich and the poor, so we have an obligation to try to do something about it. At the very least, we can try voluntarily to lower our own salary.
Recently, I was looking at the salary scale of a charitable organisation here in Malawi and discovered to my dismay that the man at the top earned well over 20 times what the sweepers earned. When I queried this, the general feeling was that paying high salaries to executives was the only way of getting high-quality ones. Is that really the way God thinks, or just the way the world thinks? Is a man who won't do God's work unless he's highly paid really a high-quality person for the job of managing a Christian organisation? Is the genuinely good work such an organisation may be doing not offset by the false witness it is giving about poorness and riches?
I'm asking questions because I'm not entirely sure of the answers. But I am sure that the situation is not ideal.
Recently I've heard a number of young and dedicated young people talk about leaving various Christian organisations because of the relatively low pay. When I expressed my sadness at their attitude, they said something like this, "We wouldn't mind if everyone in the organisation were getting correspondingly low salaries, but the administrators (managers, partners, or whatever) are getting rich while we make all the sacrifices." What can be said to that? Their attitude is less than perfect, but not unreasonable. And if what they believe is true, it's an example of how lust for riches damages the whole Christian community. Luxury addiction is contagious!
We must also, of course, look at the sort of work we're doing. Are we contributing to the welfare of the community or damaging it? Is it right for Christians to work in the insurance or advertising business? In the tobacco or beer business? Should we have anything to do with aid industry or The World Bank? Should we sell luxury cars, or videos? Should one even be a missionary when one knows that our missionary presence spreads luxury addiction? Again, I am asking questions because I'm not sure of the answers. All must make up their
own minds about specific cases. But the questions should be asked.
One also has to ask questions about earning interest. While I don't believe that the Jewish Law is binding on Christians, I do believe that it is a valuable source of information about God's intentions for us. I also know that the gross increase in riches and luxury addiction of the last 500 or 600 years, with the resulting damage, if not destruction, of God's creation, and the vast gap between the rich and the poor, and the unrest, division and mutual resentment it has caused, would not have been possible without the income generated by lending money at interest.
To me, God's condemnation of interest in the Old Testament and the observable results of our Christian decision to ignore that condemnation together mean that we should be very very suspicious of participating in it.
At the same time, I have to admit honestly that I have not yet brought myself to refuse all interest-earning situations. It would, in fact, be quite difficult to do so, since some are built into my contract. ( Not that that is any excuse!)
I merely feel that God wants me to share my disquiet, and the conviction that he is urging me, and other Christians, in that direction.
There is very a lot more that could be said about breaking our luxury addiction and the adoption of righteous poorness as a way of life. But I think thaenough has been said to give anyone who wishes to achieve poorness a basis for identifying the issues in his own life uand making decisions about them.
It has been my hope that doing that will be of help, and that some people may be set free from a burden. I know very well that many will be unable to accept that they are addicts, and that riches, far from bringing them the promised happiness, bring disaster instead. I know equally well that many who accept these things will be unable to change their goals and lifestyles enough to achieve true poorness. The struggle is a difficult one, as I know from my experience, particularly my own failure to do what I believe God wants me to do.
Fortunately, even partial success brings its rewards and blessings, and each of these is an encouragement to carry on. In the days after World War II when drug addiction was becoming a serious problem in the United States, someone said that being a drug addict was like having a 40 pound monkey clinging to your back. Luxury addiction is the same kind of burden.
Throwing it off - even in part - frees us from a great deal of fatigue and stress and frees us for greater peace, love and joy.
It is not easy, but it is rewarding. That I have been able to make the small progress that I have is in no small measure due to my having been blessed by God with a life specially constructed to reveal to me from experience the evil results of riches and the blessings of poorness. For one of my stubborn nature, nothing else would have sufficed to make me even consider taking up the position I am now occupying. I am very grateful to God for the blessing he has given me, and have undertaken this book in the desire of fulfilling to the best of my ability the purpose for which that blessing was given.
2. Richard K. Taylor, "The Imperative of Economic De-development," The other Side, July-August, 1974
3. If you're interested in following this up, consult various books by Lyall Watson, such as Supernature and Lifetide, and also Virginia Stem Owens, And The trees Clap Their Hands, the latter available from The Cornelius Fellowship Library.
4. Revolution Through Peace (New York: Harper, 1971) p.142
5. For a strong statement of this with much supporting evidence, consult Why Wait? by Johh McDowell and Dick Day.
6. Lords of Poverty by Graham Hancock
Those wishing to consult scriptures on the whole subject of poverty and riches will find most of the relevant passages listed below. Due to the wide variation in translations, some listed verses may seem not to apply in one version but to do so in another.
SABBATH YEAR AND JUBILEE: Exodus 23:10-11; Leviticus 25:8-28; 29-31; 39-54; Deuteronomy 15:1-2; 15:12-18
CHARGING INTEREST: Exodus 22:25; Leviticus 25: 35-38; Deuteronomy 23:19-20; Proverbs 28:8; Nehemiah 5:7-11; Psalms 15:5; Ezekial 18: 1-19; 22:12
GOD'S ATTITUDE TOWARD THE RICH & RICHES: Genesis 24:34-35; Deuteronomy 8:17-18; 1 Samuel 2:7-8; 1 Kings 3:10-13; 2 Chronicles 1:11-12; 17:5; Job 31: 24-28; 34:18-19; Psalms 17:14-25; 37:13; 112:1-3; Proverbs 8:18-21; 10:22; 11:16; 13:22; 15:16; 22:1; 22:4; 28:6; 28:20; Ecclesiastes 3 2:26; 5:10; 4:7-8; Isaiah 3:14-255: 8-10; 5:14-17; 10:1-4; 53:9; 55:1-2; Jeremiah 5:26-29; 7:5-7; 9:23-24; 17:11; 48:7; 49:4-5; 51:13; Ezekial 16:49-50; Hosea 12:7-11; Amos 2:7; 4:1; 5:10-15; 6:1-7
LAWS OF LENDING: Deuteronomy 24:6; 24:10-13; 24:17
THE UNTRUSTWORTHINESS OF RICHES: Psalms 39:6; 49:1-20; 52:6-7; Proverbs 3:13-16; 8:17-19; 11:4; 11:28; 13:8; 22:16; 23:4-5; 28:22; 30:7-9; Ecclesiastes 5:10-1210:6; Ezekial 28:4-10
WEALTH AS A HINDRANCE TO FELLOWSHIP: Genesis 13:5-7; 26:12-15; 31:1-21
PROPER USE OF RICHES: Deuteronomy 14:22-29; Proverbs 3:9; 19:17; 22:9
GOD'S CONCERN FOR THE POOR, WIDOWS & ORPHANS: Exodus 6:5-7; 22:21-24; 23:6; 23:10-11; Leviticus 14:19-22; 19:9-10; 25:1-55; 27:8; Deuteronomy 10:18; 14:22-28; 15:1-18; 24:10-15; 24:17-22; 25:5-10; 25:19-21 26:5-8; 26:12-13; 27:19; 1 Samuel 2:8; Psalm 14:6; 22:24-25; 34:6; 35:10; 68:5; 68:10; 69:32; 74:21; 82:3-4; 94:5-6 107:4-9 107:35-36; 112:9; 113:7; 132:15; 140:12; 146:8-9; Proverbs 14:31; 15:25; 17:5; 19:17; 21:13; 22:9; 22:16; 22:22-23; 25:21 28:8; 28:27; 29:7; 29:14; 30:11-14; 31:8-9; 31:20; Isaiah 1:11-17; 3:14-26; 10:1-4; 11:1-4; 14:30; 25:3-4; 32:7; 41:7; 58:6-7; 61:1-3; Jeremiah 5:26-29; 7:5-7; 22:3; Ezekial 16:49-51; 18:11-13; 22:1-12; Amos 2: 6-7; 4:1-3 5:11-13; 8:4-8; Zechariah 7:10; Malachi 3:5
GOD'S LOVE FOR CREATION: Genesis 1:1; 1:10; 1:13; 1:18; 1:21; 1:26-28; 2:15; 3:14-24; 6:19-20; 8:21-22; 9:2-17; Exodus 23:10-12; Leviticus 25:4-7; 25:23; 26:32-35; Deuteronomy 20:19; 25:4; 1 Kings 17:1-6; Job 39:5-6; Psalms 65:9; 65:13; 95:1-5; 96:11-12; 97:6-7; 103:22; 104:5-35; 145:10-11; 145:14-16; 145:21; 148:1; 148:2-4; 148:7-12; Isaiah 5:8-10; 11:6-9
Wisdom 6:4-9; 13:1-9; Ecclesiasticus 4:1-11; 5:1; 11:12-20; 13:1-8; 16:24-17:14; 26:28-27:1; 31:1-11; Daniel 3:26-90
DANGERS OF WEALTH: Matthew 6:19-34; 13:22; 19:16-30; 21:12-13; Mark 4:19; 10:17-27; Luke: 6:20-26; 8:14; 12:13-21;15: 11-31; 16:1-31; 18:18-30; John 6:1-8
PROCLAMATION OF AN UPSIDE-DOWN KINGDOM: Matthew 6:20-33; 7:2; 20:1-16; 25:31-46; 26:6-13; Mark: 4:24; 6:8; 10:29-31; 11:12-17; 12:41-44; 14:1-11; Luke 1:52-53; 3:14; 4:18-19; 6:20-26; 6:36-38; 9:1-6; 9:57-60; 10:4; 12:22-34; 13:22-32; 14:12-14; 12:28-33; 19:1-10; 21:1-4; John 2:12-16
GOD'S CONCERN FOR THE POOR: Matthew 8:20; Mark 10:21; Luke 1:53; 6:20-25; 6:33-36; 14:12-14; 14:15-24; 18:22
PROPER USE OF WEALTH: Luke 3:10-14; 12:13-34; 16:1-15
GOD'S LOVE OF CREATION: Luke 12:24; John 1:3-5; 1:14; 3:16
THE EVILS OF RICHES: 1 Timothy 6:6-10; 6:17-19; Titus 3:3; James 4:1-7;5:1-5
POORNESS: Acts 2:44-45; 4:32; 5:1-11; 2 Corinthians 8:12-15; Philippians 4:10-14; James 2:5-8; Revelation 7:14-18
GOD'S SPECIAL CONCERN FOR THE POOR: Romans 12:13; James 2:1-71; John 3:17-18
GOD'S LOVE OF CREATION: Romans 1:20; Ephesians 1:7-12; Colossians 1:18-20
GREED: Romans 1:29; Ephesians 5:3; 5:5; Colossians 3:5; 1 Thessalonians 2:5; 1 Timothy 3:3; 3:8; 2 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:7; 1:10-11; 1 Peter 5:2; 2 Peter 2:3; 2:14
CHARGING INTEREST: 1 Corinthians 5:11; 6:9-10
CHRISTIAN PROSPERITY: 2 Corinthians 3:3-10; Hebrews 10:32-36
GIVING: 2 Corinthians 8:1-9:15; Galatians 2:10; Philippians 4:18-20; 1 Timothy 6:17-19; 1 John 3:17
Stewart Lane has been both wealthy and poor - poor enough to need to steal in order to eat. He has been as well a pastor among the very rich and the very poor. "My life experience qualifies me," he says, "to assert with assurance that the claim that riches brings happiness is false. It was no surprise to me, then, to discover that the Bible says exactly that and says it very strongly."
Weep, You Rich is an attempt to show how deeply money worship has corrupted modern Christianity and to say to money-oriented people of every level of income that they are following a false god who cannot bring them the peace they seek either in this life or the next.
"Malawi is a rich country," says Rev. Lane. "Rich in human relationships, in social cohesion and in personal wholeness, but we are squandering those riches in the search for material wealth which brings fragmentation and disintegration. If I can persuade even a few people that this is a mistake, then I feel that Weep, You Rich has done its job. "
Rev. Lane has worked among the young people of Malawi for nearly 30 years and is a well-known columnist and author who makes his home in Limbe.