Temple Costs (1) Den of Thieves

When Jesus cleansed the temple, he accused the temple leaders of turning it from a House of Prayer into a Den of Thieves (Matt 21:12-14).

My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.

We should think about what Jesus meant when he said that the temple had become a Den of Thieves. We usually assume that the people selling stuff and changing money were charging exorbitant prices, but that was not the problem. They were charging stiff prices, but they could only charge what the market would bear. No one was forced to buy from them. People chose to buy in the temple for their own convenience. They could have purchased their offering before they arrived at the temple, or changed their money with other merchants. So, the people that Jesus threw out were technically not thieves.

The problem was that the temple system was shifting income and wealth away from the ordinary people. They were under pressure to pay for building the temple that Herod had built by making offerings that they could not afford. The temple was a great tourist attraction, so merchants and innkeepers prospered, but the poor people were being pressured into paying for it.

This was not how the law was meant to work. Under the law, money and wealth should have been flowing to the poor from the rich.

The temple itself had become a den of thieves because it was depriving the ordinary people of income and pushing them into poverty. This was the opposite of what the law required.

Piketty (17) Capital v Wealth

Piketty uses the terms capital and wealth interchangeably. I think that his is a serious problem with his thinking. For an economist, capital is productive stuff like factories, machinery, and computers. The purpose of capital is production.

Wealth is a broader concept. It includes all assets that give a rate of return. Many of these are financial assets, which represent the ownership of real capital (eg shares). Others are loans that are only loosely linked to assets. The focus of wealth is income, which is Piketty’s concern. He is not interested in production. He focuses on understanding how wealth gives people control of income. This is a legitimate concern, but his interest is in wealth, not in capital. Therefore, his use of the word capital to describe wealth is not helpful.

For example, Piketty says that the Industrial Revolution allowed European nations to claim a huge share of world income (59). He ignores the fact that the accumulation of capital enabled them to expand production extensively, which created enormous wealth.

Viewed in this way, wealth becomes a bad thing. This means that by association capital is a bad thing too. For example, Piketty sees 1914-1945 as a good period, because inequality decreased. It was actually a really bad period, because massive capital destruction occurred all over the world. Immense resources went in the production of armaments, where then blown up. That loss of capital made everyone worse off.

Piketty is wrong. Capital is really important. That reason that so many people in the world have escaped from subsistence is the last few centuries has been the accumulation of capital equipment. Capital makes people more productive. Most of the world needs more capital.

Wealth is a different issue. It may be distributed unfairly and obtained illegally. However, we must be careful that we do not destroy capital in an attempt to eliminate unequal distributions of wealth. That would make everyone worse off.

Wealth and Revival

The key to the fullness of the spirit is Christians Connecting with each other, loving one another as Jesus has loved us. He will only put his new wine in wineskin that is made of love.

The greatest barrier to Christians connecting is our wealth. In a traditional society, people were bound together by mutual obligation. I helped you with your harvest, and you helped me with mine. If a woman was sick, the other women came to care for her family. Most exchanges of goods and services took place through giving and sharing out of mutual obligation.

Most of these transactions have now been monetised. If I need someone to help with the harvest, I pay someone to help. If a woman gets sick, she pays someone to provide childcare and do the housework. Very little giving and haring takes place outside of immediate families.

Our wealth makes this possible. Most goods and services are now paid for with money. Wealth has contaminated our relationships. People form relationships with the people they work with or for recreation, but they have limited interaction with the people in their communities.

Christian relationships have been casualised in a similar way. We go to church on Sunday to receive services from the ministry team and pay for them with tithes. We have only casual relationships with other Christians.

God may have to take away our wealth to get us back into connection with each other. May be this the key to the evangelist David Pawson’s question to New Zealand. He asked.

Who is willing to pray for economic ruin to make revival possible.

This is a hard prayer to pray. I am not sure if I am up for it.

Three Mountains (13) - Wealth

Free market capitalism has solved the production problem. It allowed human initiative and inventiveness to flourish. The accumulation of capital has massively increased human productivity. Free trade has supported a greater division of labour. These factors have massively increased the wealth of the western world. We have moved from a life of subsistence to a world of prosperity in a couple of centuries.

There are now thousands of high wealth individuals in the world. They hold a huge share of the wealth that is produced in the world.

The problem with free market capitalism than wealth tends to be concentrated in the hands of a few.

1. Efficient entrepreneurs are rewarded with increasing wealth. That is as it should be. Many use the increase in wealth to expand their enterprise.

2. Wealth flows to those who already have wealth. Those who inherit wealth will find it much easier to increase their wealth than those with none. Wealth begats wealth.

3. The corrupt, crafty and unscrupulous will often do even better. They will often manipulate and swindle the less misfortunate to defraud them for their own benefit.

4. When wealthy people collude with political rulers, the flow of wealth to the rich and powerful is really boosted.

5. Some wealth flows down to those at the bottom, but the flow up is far greater.

6. When governments produce economic depressions, the poor suffer most.

Secular capitalism increases the wealth of most people in society, but it also produces increased inequality.

Scarcity (9) - Wasted Wealth

The huge increase in wealth that we have seen over the last few centuries has resolved the production problem that constrained the subsistence economy. Productive efficiency no longer needs to be the overriding economic driver. Other goals can now be achieved without risking economic security. This increase income and wealth could have several different impacts in the Christian community.

1. An equivalent increase in consumption of goods and services. This is what we have seen in the Western World, but it has not produced increasing contentment. In fact the more we have, the more that we seem to need.

2. Massive accumulation of capital. This would make the economy even more productive in the future.

3. An increase in leisure time. There been some increase in leisure, but most people work as much as ever. Women are probably working more.

4. Outpouring of generosity. The New Testament churches were very generous. They shared with each other and supported people and communities that faced poverty. However, their generosity was limited by their own relative poverty. They just did not have the capacity to support a dramatic economic transformation.

The situation is now different. We have experienced a massive increase in income and wealth that could be used to fund an equally massive generosity and deep sharing. Christians living in the West have the potential to support an enormous transfer of wealth that would lift large number of people out of poverty. We could do this without needing to sacrifice a satisfactory lifestyle.

The modern world has chosen option 1 and 2 with a little bit of option 3. That makes sense for the world.

The Church could have stood apart from the world by choosing option 4, but we have not been that enthusiastic. A wonderful opportunity to transform society and advance the Kingdom has been dissipated in a property boom and a frenzy of consumption.

The Long Put

The economic journalists are getting stirred up about the huge bonuses paid to ultra rich bankers. Their concern is that by the time the consequences of the bankers trading come home to roost, the bonuses are well spent.

I am not too worried about the bankers. There is one contingency that they have not built into their computer models. They will have to give an account to God for what they do with their money.

The Parable of the shrewd manager (Luke 16:1-12) is not easy to interpret, but one thing is clear. We will accountable to God for what we do with our material wealth, not just for our spiritual gifts. Jesus adds a further challenge.

From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked (Luke 12:48).

The more that people have, the more that God expects of them. I am glad that I do not get a million dollar bonus, because I could not cope with the responsibility that brings.

One day the bankers and deal makers will have to stand before God and give an account of what they have done with all that they were given. All their options will be closed out. Why would anyone envy them.