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Following Jesus in nonviolent struggle for justice and peace, we love our neighbors and enemies as God loves us all, becoming a peace church to share in God’s work to save the world.

The Heresy of Wealth and Violence

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The Heresy of Wealth and Violence
by Allan Bostelmann, ECAPC member in Minneapolis

Heresies, as I understand it, are serious mistakes of belief in Christianity. Many theologians believe as Christians we’ve been living the Constantinian heresy of wealth, privilege, prerogative, dominative power and violence during the last 1700 years of our history. Wealth, privilege, prerogative, dominative power and violence are all elements that Jesus rejected by word and deed while he visited us on earth. And so did his earlier followers.

When after 300 years what could be called evangelical poverty and nonviolence, the Christian movement accepted the pagan temples, wealth, and the legitimatization that Emperor Constantine offered it, Christianity began to slide down a slippery slope of justified, state supported, legitimized violence. And it apparently hasn’t recovered since.

How are we to think about monetary wealth? In my situation for instance; when I was at my top salary I found I was on the bottom fourth in income with my undergraduate university alumnae and the bottom tenth of my graduate school university. Yet, at the same time I was living better than 95% of the world’s population. How does that happen? One explanation is that I live in a country that has (at least up to this time) been able to bully its economic way throughout the world.

For Jesus, the biggest impediment to faith is wealth. In the New Testament Jesus seems to say that wealth is an impediment because wealth provides a certain kind of security which is quite different from the kind of security that comes from God alone.

In the New Testament, Jesus was more interested in bringing about the Kingdom of God, than he was in proclaiming he was God’s son. For Jesus, the KOG would be a kingdom of the poor. And the rich would have no part of it as long as they remained rich. (Luke 6: 20-26)

Both the New Testament and Hebrew scriptures strongly indicate that God has a preference for the poor. It’s not that God loves the poor more than the rich. But the way he loves the rich is to urge them to share with the poor. And, if we can believe the account in Acts, the early Christian community lived a life of evangelical poverty where everyone what they needed and those who had luxury wealth shared their excess with the poor. I think that came from an understanding that God had created a world where there is enough for everyone to have the necessities for life but not the luxuries.

If we live in a house or neighborhood or a nation where we have luxury wealth while those around us don’t have the necessities for life, we have to find means to hurt or harm others (purchase a gun or a missile or police or armies) to protect our luxury wealth. Violence is the Siamese twin to luxury wealth. And make no mistake, we Western Christians are up to our ears in wealth. I have luxury wealth and trinkets that even the rich man (in Jesus story of the rich man and Lazarus) couldn’t even dream of.

Someone wrote once that if wealth were spread evenly throughout the world, we would all be living like Eastern Europeans. I don’t know how accurate that is but I’ve thought about it. My immediate reaction is that I wouldn’t want to scale back my life style that much. But then I think, would I be willing to cut back my lifestyle if I knew it would keep my children and future offspring alive? Would I be willing to sacrifice my lifestyle to keep alive children, women and families from countries that we presently define as enemies?

When we wage wars in order to ”protect our way of life” are we talking about our affluent lifestyle? Is our affluence part of what Jesus had in mind when he talks about having an abundant life? Of course not!

Jesus indicated to us that before we attempted to take the mote out of our Muslim brother’s eye we must first take out the beam in our own. There is an ongoing intense debate critiquing Islam as to whether it is a violent religion. Have we have overlooked the unfortunate fact that in the last 1700 years no sociologically identifiable group has killed more people in wars than the group called Christian?

Currently, with our wealth we’re willing to destroy other humans made in the likeness and image of God to the point that we’ve stopped collecting statistics on them. We do know that in the 10 years before we invaded Iraq when over one half million children 5 years and under were killed directly and indirectly by our bombings we heard nary a peep from the Christian “right to life” movement.

Are we the wealthy who have hardened our hearts to the fact that we’ve been terrorizing the rest of the world for over 60 years with our nuclear capabilities?

Both the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament depict a God who is active in history. If we look at what has happened to us historically in the past few years, is it just coincidence that what got destroyed on 9/11 were the symbols of wealth and violence in the US (the Twin Towers and the Pentagon)? Or is something else going on here?

Do we need to look at our heresies? Do we need to repent? Is there really any other response we can make to God at this point in our history than: Lord have mercy! Lord have mercy! Lord have mercy!?

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