Bible Verses And Christian Stories About Money ... And What Jesus Really Said About Money

• Using the words of Jesus as heroic stories about money.

• Using the words of Jesus as morality tales about the evils of money.

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Dear Seeker,

What if Jesus really didn't say you couldn't get into heaven if you're rich? Would that make a difference in your life?

So...

Did Jesus really say that you can't get into heaven if you're rich?

Just think about it. If you had any kind of Christian religious training at any point in your life, you've learned powerful lessons about money.

Do these lessons sound familiar?

• Money itself is evil.
  
  
• Money is a sign of God's blessing.
  
  
• Money is to be given away to the poor.

And there are many other lessons that keep you struggling with a conflicting hodgepodge of beliefs about whether money is good or bad.

And consider this...

You don't have to be Christian to be affected by Christian beliefs about money. Christian ideas are deeply rooted in many societies of the world.

The truth is, there is no single set of Christian beliefs about any topic. And, this is especially true about money.

Money is one of the necessities of life. Money is power. Those who have it have social and political power. Those without money struggle endlessly. And, the truth is that most people struggle with never quite having enough money.

So what's the problem?

The Problem Is With Bible Verses

The heart of the problem is that most Christian education uses Bible verses to teach very complex topics. And, most Christian education does not put the words of the Bible into any larger context.

What's the result? — Confusion and Conflict.

Here's just one example of what happens when a few words are taken out of context.

Consider This Question About A Rich Man And Heaven

I once attended a seminar about creating a millionaire mindset. After a break, I was returning to my seat when I saw one of the students talking with the speaker. The speaker was standing on the platform looking down.

As I got closer, I heard the student ask: "How can you say it is good to be rich? Jesus said that a rich man can't get into Heaven." The speaker looked down at the man and said: "That's just an allegorical story about being greedy. If you're not greedy, then there is nothing wrong with being rich."

Making Up Stories About The Bible

This fragment of a conversation demonstrates what happens when two people of widely divergent religious backgrounds converge on one Bible verse. They might be talking about the same Bible verse, but are a universe part in understanding.

Missing The Point

Each of these two men had made up a story about Jesus and money. And each in his own way had missed the fundamental point of the story behind the words.

The distressed questioner had misquoted the verse itself. Jesus did not say that a rich man can’t get into Heaven.

In the three biblical versions of the story, Jesus made a statement about a rich man entering the Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Heaven. By identifying the "Kingdom of Heaven" with "Heaven," the questioner had significantly missed the point of the story.

What's The Money Lesson?

For his part, the speaker claimed that Jesus was using an allegory to teach a lesson about greed.

So, within the brief conversation, we have one man in conflict over a misquoted Bible verse and a teacher who dismissed the question with an answer that turned a biblical story about an unjust society into a moralistic statement about greed.

Misquotes And Misunderstanding

In this one brief conversation, both the speaker and the questioner expressed beliefs based on a few words cut adrift from the context of the original story.

Context Brings Clarity Of Understanding

When the words of Jesus to the rich man are put into the context of the story itself, it is clear that what Jesus had to say about the rich man was part of his condemnation of an oppressive economic system.

Introducing "Going Broke With Jesus"

Going Broke With Jesus: How Heroic Stories Intended To Liberate The Poor Become Biblical Urban Legends About The Evils Of Money by Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D.

The only solution to such confusion and conflict is to put Bible verses into context.

This is what I have done in my book: Going Broke With Jesus: How Heroic Stories Intended To Liberate The Poor Become Biblical Urban Legends About The Evils Of Money.

Why have I written this book?

First of all, I also grew up with such limiting beliefs about money, based on what I learned in Sunday School.

The most important reason is that I am a biblical scholar by training.

What I Learned About Reading The Bible In Theological Seminary

During my first semester as a student in theological seminary, I took my first course in Biblical Greek. I began to realize that the scholars who could read Greek knew secrets that they were not willing to share with the people sitting in churches on Sunday mornings. And the next year, when I began to learn Hebrew, I grew only more aware that the people who could read Greek and Hebrew knew more than they were telling.

Even as a beginning student, I saw translation errors. I saw words added in translations and taken out of translations, to perpetuate traditional readings. The ones who could read Greek and Hebrew knew better. But they were keeping the secrets.

It wasn’t just reading Greek and Hebrew that made the difference. I learned about manuscript traditions. I learned about the differences between ancient writings and modern books. I learned about the problems of translating ancient languages into modern languages, and how much we have imposed English meanings into Biblical readings. In all of this, I saw more and more how the professional scholars knew secrets they weren't telling the people in churches.

Hiding The Truth

Our teachers would sometimes comment: "Don’t tell the people in the churches about this. You'll destroy their faith."

I decided very early that I would have no part of that game. I thought that adults deserved to be treated as adults. During my internship year, when I first preached and taught in church, I taught what I knew, as well as I knew how to teach it.

There Is Resistance To Teaching The Truth

Yet the resistance to teaching the truth about the Bible runs in both directions. One of the reasons that scholars resist telling the people what they know is that scholars have too often been treated as heretics when they challenge childish notions about the Bible.

As a doctoral student in Biblical studies, I was a teaching assistant before I began to teach my own classes. Many times, I attempted to bring an adult perspective to students who were acting like two-year olds having temper tantrums, or to crying students who lamented that their faith had been destroyed because of something a professor said in class. The professors were simply translating what was there in the Greek or the Hebrew, and yet they became targets for student outrage. Some of the students took this as proof that what they had been warned about was really true: "Seminaries were cemeteries of faith."

Set Free By Scholarship

Scholarship is what set me free from the well-meaning Sunday school lessons that taught me that:

• Jesus wanted me to be poor.
  
  
• I had to choose between God or money.
  
  
• The rich cannot get into Heaven.

I believe profoundly that the scholarship in Going Broke With Jesus will liberate you from these kinds of ideas about money.

And so, I have attempted to include scholarship in a way that is clear and genuinely helpful. You might have to slow down to read it, but my goal is not to impress you with my knowledge. My goal is to set you free from the kind of Bad Bible reading that treats you as a disobedient little child who needs to be told what is good for you.

If you can read the words on this page, you are an adult who deserves to be treated as an adult, especially concerning money and the Bible.

I promise you: Nothing in this book will destroy your faith in God or Jesus as the Son of God.

I also promise you: Much in this book will set you free from the morality tales that obscure the liberating intent of the Christian gospel stories.

My goal is to set you free from such limiting religious education so that you can make up your own mind about what the Bible actually says about money.

The real problem is that most of us learned about money from out-of-context Bible verses. The only liberating solution is to put the Bible verses into context to determine what they meant in the gospel narratives.

What You Will Discover In This Book

This is a three part book.

Part I, "Society and Stories" concerns context. The essential task of a biblical scholar is to put the words of the Bible into context, to determine what they meant.

Chapter 1 begins with the most misunderstood of all the money stories—the statement about a rich man and the eye of the needle—to demonstrate how people make up widely divergent meanings for Biblical verses. This chapter also introduces the concept of "biblical urban legends."

Chapter 2 concerns the inevitable and irreconcilable conflicts about money which results from reducing biblical stories to Bible verses. This chapter focuses on the differences between "prosperity" and "social gospel" approaches to money, based on Bible verses.

Chapter 3 concerns the context of an agrarian society, in which wealth was based on land. This economic context is the essential foundation of the gospel stories.

Chapter 4 concerns the context of a gospel story, as a victory story, and how the sayings about money need to be seen within that context.

Chapter 5 concerns the context of a hero’s story, to describe Jesus as a hero on a hero's journey.

Part II, "The Money Stories," looks at 8 Bible verses about money.

Chapters 6-13 are each focused on a specific biblical statement about money in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Some will be very familiar, some not as familiar, and two might seem to be out of place in the book.

GOD AND MAMMON

THE LORD'S PRAYER

BLESSED ARE THE POOR

TAXES TO CAESAR

THE MONEY CHANGERS

HONOR YOUR FATHER AND YOUR MOTHER

THE POOR WIDOW

THE RICH YOUNG MAN

I have not included any of the parables of Jesus, leaving them for another book. I have also limited myself to the words of Jesus, which means that I am not including the famous statement from 1 Timothy 6:10, “The love of money is a root of all evils,” which is so often misquoted as “Money is the root of all evil.”

My method is to put these words of Jesus into their social and story contexts. This method will help to recover the heroic nature of the stories and demonstrate that so much of what we have been taught about these words has misrepresented what the words meant. Loss of these social and story contexts has turned heroic words into morality tales. In the process, words intended to be "good news" turn into Bad Bible.

Part III. "What It Means," considers what these money stories mean in your own context.

Chapter 14 concerns money and power. It asks why Christian tradition has so often missed the real intention behind the stories of Jesus about money. Why are heroic stories used to teach obedience and poverty, instead of heroism?

Chapter 15 makes it personal, by offering a heroic vision of your own hero’s journey about money.

If you learned about Jesus and money from bible verses, wouldn’t you like to get the whole story?

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