How do you know when you’re in the right job? Is there a line for Christians between “enough” and “too much” money—and if so, where is it? How much cash should I put in the freewill donation box for the concessions I choose at the high school theatre performance? Is the stock market an unbiblical way to make income? How much paid time off should I provide for my employees? Is all work virtuous? Is it more important to pay off my car or save for an emergency? How do I decide if I should give money to the panhandler at the stoplight ahead?
Every day we navigate decisions small and large about what kinds of tasks to do in our jobs and in our homes, how to budget and grow our incomes, how to arrange our time toward that elusive “work-life balance,” and more. Yet, in my experience, these kinds of economic questions are rarely addressed aloud in communities of faith. Sure, we may talk openly about giving during the church’s stewardship season, but the idea that our religious commitments have a bearing on the innumerable questions we face day in and day out about our jobs and our resources is rarely addressed in the congregations I’ve known.
The Bible, on the other hand, is full of texts concerned with the vocational and economic ordering of our lives. In fact, when I was first asked to write this article about my new course for Faith+Lead Academy, “Work and Money in the Ten Commandments,” I wanted to start the piece with some statistics on how often the Bible talks about work and/or money. One claim made repeatedly across online sources is that over 2000 verses in the Bible refer to financial matters. After some Googling, some reading, and some counting, I soon realized that statistic is nearly impossible to fact-check. A mere mention of money in the Bible does not mean the verse or its larger context is about money, and a biblical passage can impact our understanding of money without ever using any financial vocabulary. In other words, what and how much the Bible says about money, work, or any other topic depends on how a reader interprets any given passage, including the questions they bring to it. The Bible always requires interpretation, and such discernment is never a one-and-done answer, but rather an ongoing conversation.
Take, for instance, the Ten Commandments (a.k.a. the Decalogue). (We’ll use the list in Exodus 20 for convenience here, but in the course we dive into the fact that it’s not always clear what the laws are that fall under the “Ten Commandments” umbrella!) “Remember the Sabbath day,” “You shall not steal,” and “You shall not covet” are, at least at first glance, the only three of the ten that refer directly to labor or economic resources. But what might it mean to read the Decalogue’s opening salvo—“You shall have no other gods before me”—through the lenses of work and money? In what very real ways, for instance, have we let income become our hope for salvation, the thing we value above all else—what theologian Paul Tillich called our “ultimate concern”? Do we really, deep in our hearts, aspire to be like Jesus—or like billionaires? And how does that desire manifest itself in our day-to-day actions?
In an Easter Sunday opinion piece in the New York Times, Christian columnist David French wrote a concise and insightful diagnosis of American society’s current malaise: “We live in a nation of prosperity, but we are not thriving. Instead, we struggle to feel like equal members of a society that is orienting itself to cater to the desires of a very wealthy minority.” I find French’s language of “orientation” to be particularly helpful. How should Christians position ourselves in a world that turns toward material wealth as a representation of “success” or even “the good”? What will our daily decisions look like if we are turned toward the economic values of Scripture instead? And how do we connect those values across time and culture, given that the biblical writers knew nothing of cryptocurrency or capitalism or the S&P 500?In the “Work and Money in the Ten Commandments” course, we will read the laws of the Decalogue with the hope of being confronted by new and better questions about work and money. We will learn more about the laws’ ancient context, their connections to other biblical texts, and the values that drive them. I make no pretensions about finding definitive answers to the questions the course raises. Rather, my greatest hope for the class is that students will take to heart the idea that Scripture matters for all that we do—not because it gives us some sort of singular, “correct” answer, but rather because in each new interpretive encounter between a particular reader and a particular text, with the help of the Holy Spirit we see the world with new eyes, and we are empowered to lead in every aspect of life with the love and justice of God.
