It is not clear to me what an economically well-ordered life looks like for a Christian in the West. I suspect that obedience to Jesus in our pecuniary affairs looks significantly more radical than what we have grown accustomed to, but as far as I can tell there is no neat prescription for how to get from here to there. I suppose we need at least to be open to the possibility that Jesus was being completely serious when he called the rich young ruler to sell all of his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.
The first step toward that openness is probably a reorientation of our thinking about the created world we live in, for indeed, “Unlike the world sketched out by Malthus and still preserved in the pages of economics texts, the world is not a hardscrabble land of unlikeness, parched and stricken by scarcity; it is charged with the grandeur of God.”1
To live in amazement at the reckless and irresponsible generosity of God is to begin to work away from the stale concepts of “stewardship” that we have become almost hypnotized by and toward what I suspect is a more faithful witness of cross-carrying.
- McCarraher, Eugene. The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (p. 84). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition. ↩︎
Meaningful Returns 