Can we talk? About money? Affluent Christians

The Good of Affluence: Seeking God in a Culture of Wealth. By John R. Schneider. Eerdmans, 233 pp., $24.00.

The Consuming Passion: Christianity and the Consumer Culture. Edited by Rodney Clapp. InterVarsity, 223 pp., $16.00 paperback.

Ministry and Money: A Guide for Clergy and their Friends. By Dan Hotchkiss. Alban Institute, 134 pp., $16.00 paperback.

IN MY CONGREGATION the choir saves its biggest anthem for the collection of the weekly offering, and I sometimes suspect that the anthem is there not to draw attention to the offering but to distract us from it. The offering plates are passed apologetically, as people try not to see what others have put in. When the plates are brought to the altar, the prayers of thanksgiving praise God for many things but seldom for the dollars and cents in the plates, which are then carried to a tiny shelf behind the organ, out of sight.

That shelf was actually part of the architectural plans for the church, and the congregation prided itself on the theological view behind it: the money must be whisked away because it would soil or sully the communion table. Maybe someday we'll install a dumbwaiter next to the altar to get that money out of sight even faster.

When I arrived at the church, the memory of church splits made me wary of speaking about money for fear of appearing to sing for my supper to a crowd that wasn't much interested in cooking. Yet that fear was overcome by my conviction that unease about money lies at the heart of many congregations' paralysis when it comes to proclaiming the gospel. Money mattered to Jesus, to Paul and to the prophets, and it ought to matter to the church. It is in its attitude toward money that the church is most likely to conform to the ways of the world rather than to transcend them.

John Schneider, a professor of religion and theology at Calvin College, wants to take money not only off the shelf but out of the doghouse as well. Schneider contends that Christians too long have been critical of wealth. "I strongly challenge the widely held belief that the world-shrinking effects of globalism generate strong obligations for any wealthy person in an advanced society to any poor person in an undeveloped one." Modern capitalism, Schneider maintains, has not been treated fairly by Christians. Schneider considers capitalism a very recent phenomenon that until World War I existed only in England and the U.S. Since then, "twenty-five nations have successfully re-ordered their economies on the lines of modern capitalism.... They have done nothing less than eliminate material poverty as a significant problem in their societies."

For those who live in cities like my own New Haven, which has the highest public school class size and infant mortality rate in the state, Schneider's snapshot of the world is out of focus. His focus is intentionally on the affluent, who, he believes, are too quickly dismissed by Christian thinkers. He turns to secular works like Dinesh D'Souza's Virtue of Prosperity to support his view that, since poor Americans have access to such things as televisions, microwaves and super-sized fast food, inequalities between the rich and the poor are no longer a problem. Though the rich may be getting richer, the poor aren't starving. But those who follow secular economic debates know that quoting D'Souza on poverty is like quoting Phyllis Schlafly on women's rights.

Schneider's book is actually a revised edition of his previous Godly Materialism: Rethinking Money and Possessions, a book that he hopes will continue to be read as an antidote to Ronald J. Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and similar books that have called capitalism to account. Since "ours is not a culture that contains affluence, but is a culture of affluence," how do we help rich Christians deal with those hurtful slights against the rich that dot scripture and Christian history?

Schneider offers hope to the unappreciated affluent by presenting them with a savvy, networking, middle-class Jesus who "did not adopt a life of poverty, but rather called his disciples out of the ordinary world and into a community of celebration." As for all those parables about money and things, they "call Christians not to become poor (as is commonly thought) but to be wealthy in the right way."

While Schneider argues that many of the Bible's words about the poor do not apply to us directly, since modern capitalism is a new phenomenon, his investigations into New Testament culture reveal that the poor didn't have it so bad then either. "The peasantry was not always on the losing end of things," he explains. "Manipulated inflation (price fixing) by the rich actually created better prices for poorer landowners simply by artificially raising the prices for their commodities." This is biblical times? Sounds like a conversation at the country club. Schneider also points out that by spending time with publicans and tax collectors, Jesus indicates an acceptance not just of them as people, but of their money-making lifestyles as well. (He does not venture a similar argument about prostitutes.)