Is your church an Acts 4:32-35 church or a James 2 church?
In the Acts 4 Jerusalem church, the rich members gave very generously so that all of the basic economic needs of the poor members were met; a rough estimate would put 80 percent of the membership as poor, near poor or working poor. So generosity eliminating daily desperate poverty on a large scale was an economic miracle indeed. This was a remarkable Spirit-filled church.
By contrast, in the James 2 church, the rich oppressors were honored and the oppressed poor were treated as second class citizens. There was partiality, favoritism, discrimination, and judgmentalism in the church. There was a distorted faith without works, a spirituality without justice. In such a shallow spirituality, the rich oppressors can feel good about going to church. According to Robert Wuthnow (Tough Country), the rich feel more comfortable in the Texan church than poor people do.
In modern America, I would conclude that most white churches are James 2 churches; there are not many American Acts 4 churches. Why?
1. American churches lack a biblical theology of social evil; almost a total absence of a theology of oppression; no New Testament theology of the rich as oppressors, the cosmos as evil social order. To begin the process of developing a theology of social evil, I recommend God So Loved the Third World and the first chapter in Biblical Ethics and Social Change.
2. American churches neglect justice and the love of God; American churches treat Jubilee justice as a quaint Old Testament idea that is not applicable in a modern, industrial, urban society. See Stephen Mott's article "The Contribution of the Bible to Economic Thought."
3. Therefore, most American churches participate in or tolerate social evil. Historically and currently, we discriminate against the poor, women, blacks, Indians and Mexicans, to name a few.
Jesus once roared "Woe to the rich. . . . " Sounds like Jesus never studied economics. To get out of poverty, every society needs to generate some wealth, create prosperity. A person invents something, builds a factory to produce it, and in the process, makes a profit. OK, good, but a couple of ethical questions:
1. How much profit? A million or a billion?
2. How much wages? Minimum wage or a living wage? A living wage is double a minimum wage; a minimum wage leaves a person in poverty. Henry Ford paid a robust living wage; Costco pays a living wage. Walmart pays a minimum wage, but Walmart does not have a maximum profit. The Walton children are multibillionaires. If everyone prospers, we have a just economic system; cooperatives come closest to this ideal. If only a few rich people really prosper, this situation results in oppression for the poor; the poor who equally are created in the image of God are crushed and humiliated.
What would an ethical maximum profit be? Twice a living wage which would be $30; 10 times a living wage which would be $150; 100 times which would be $1500 an hour? Because we live in a fallen world, the process of producing wealth is often flawed by greed and oppression.
According to the Bible, justice should be the organizing principle of any economic system, that is a Jubilee-type of justice with the oppressed poor central, not an afterthought. Not the market, not the invisible hand, not the government, but justice. Capitalism represents one extreme, socialism another extreme with cooperatives in the middle. Coops blend individual and social responsibility. Mondragon is a model of how to organize an entire society around cooperatives.
Our process of production is well developed, but our ethics of economics is poorly developed. For a scholarly analysis of a biblical economics, see "The Contribution of the Bible to Economic Thought" by Stephen Mott. Mott takes the idea of social evil very seriously. He understands that we live in a fallen society full of fallen individuals. Because we all live in fallen societies, the process of producing wealth is often flawed by greed (personal sin) and oppression (social evil).
Mott's understanding of social evil is grounded in the New Testament concepts of cosmos (evil social order) and the principalities and powers. No white North American theologian nor any major theologian in the history of the church has ever made the biblical concept of oppression central in their theology. Both my mentor John Perkins and the black theologian James Cone have a keen sense of oppression based on their personal experience of living in the South, but neither has published a major biblical study on oppression. I have heard John Perkins preach/teach hundreds of times but never has he preached on biblical oppression.
In terms of the American economic system, social evil rages on unchecked and unchallenged. For most Americans, capitalism is God's economic system. Case closed.
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