Foundations for a Christian Economic Vision — John D. Martin — Ep. 147

So today on Anabaptist Perspectives, we're here with John D. Martin, and we are discussing the Christian view of economics.

So John, I'll write into the first question here. Describe the economic vision that emerges from the Bible and Christian orthodoxy. Perhaps you could start with a key passage from the Old Testament and maybe one from the New Testament.

Well, God has always been concerned that we understand that we don't own anything. He owns it all. And so you go to the Old Testament and you go to Leviticus 25, and you have what people call the Jubilee Principle, where God had built into his commands to his people that the land belonged to him and that everything belonged to him. And at the end of seven years, there was a partial readjustment of everything because God knew that people would tend to accumulate. And so he built into his economic plan for his people for there to be a check on that. And then every 50 years, all of the land went back to the original families.

The families were given portions of land, which they did not own. And so over the years, they would sell parts of that off, buy parts of it. People would tend to accumulate, and some would prosper, some would not as much. But every 50 years, it all got leveled off, and everybody started back at the beginning with all the equal opportunities. And in fact, the idea of withdrawing from the material to think about the reality of God is built into the concept of the rest on every seven days. Now, there's a lot of differences of opinion about how that applies in the gospel here, but there's a principle there that we take time to back away from the material world, take a vacation, and concentrate on the things that really matter, and remind ourselves that none of this stuff belongs to us.

This material world is temporary, that the real is something else, and it all belongs to God. So you get that principle right away in the Old Testament. You get it right at the beginning with the seventh rest every seven days. So that's just a principle that God built into his word, and that is that nothing belongs to us, and we tend to forget that. And so God built these reminders into the Old Testament. So that's where I would focus in the Old Testament on the Jubilee Principle and God's concern that we would literally back away from this stuff and just take a vacation. What would you see as a key passage in the New Testament then that follows up on that principle?

Well, Jesus said, "Don't lay up treasures on earth. Lay up treasures in heaven." And so that's the gospel principle that we are not supposed to accumulate things on this earth. And with the other commands that Jesus gave, "Love your enemies, pray in secret," these are just commands where he doesn't explain.

But I think Jesus knew that we would need more understanding, more motivation in this area because I think he realized that this was the one great rival against Jesus, wealth. You cannot serve God and mammon. He knew that the most popular rival that Jesus had is stuff, our possessions.

And so when he gives the command, "Don't lay up treasures on earth," he takes time to explain why. He doesn't do that, at least as much with his other commands, but he does. He really gets into this. He says, "Don't lay up treasures on earth because where your treasure is, that's where your heart's going to be. Don't ever say, 'I have all this stuff, but my heart's not there,'" which is a popular way people try to handle this. He said, "No." He said, "Show me your pile of stuff, and that's where your heart is going to be." That's just the way it is. In fact, Peter says, "Your heart, you have exercised with covetous practices."

Our heart is conditioned by the way we handle our things. And so we just constantly need to live with that understanding that what we're doing with our stuff is affecting our heart and our sense of values. Now, I want to say a little word about values. Most of Christianity gets defined in terms of morals, what is right and what is wrong. And Christians are intensely concerned about morals. I'm not minimizing that. Christians, they don't lie. They don't cheat. They don't fornicate. Right. Morals, that's good. But there's a dimension beyond morals that God wants us to be, I would say, just as concerned about in a way, maybe even more concerned about because I think morals come out of this area, which is values.

And values has not to do with what's right and what's wrong. Values has to do with what is important and what is of lesser importance. And it's interesting to me that when you go into Hebrews chapter 11, there's nothing said there in that faith chapter about morals. Nothing. There's nothing in Hebrews 11 about the morals of those people. It's all about their values. And it's interesting to me that that's the faith chapter. And so I really do believe that faith is probably going to be most determined by the value system that we have. Are we valuing the stuff on this earth? Are we valuing something else?

The Bible says that Abraham, he valued something he couldn't even see. In his lifetime, he didn't see much of it. He only saw a few descendants. But he valued, he looked for a city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. And so when we're talking about this, we're talking about values, which I think is vitally connected with our faith. I mean, our faith is also connected with our morals, but I think it's even more determined by our value system. Do we value the invisible or do we value the visible, which is transitory?

So Jesus said, "Where your treasure is, that's where your heart is going to be." The second thing he said is, "The light of the body is the eye." Now, that's often taken out of context, but this is right here in the subject of what Jesus said about possessions. And so if you don't have your possessions in a right perspective, you're going to have poor vision. You're not going to see things right. You're not going to make good decisions. You're going to make temporary decisions about transitory things. In fact, Peter talks about not being able to see afar off. To be spiritually blind is not to be without any sight at all. It's when you don't see things rightly.

And if you're going to focus on material things, you will not see afar off. You will see things in the immediate present, and you will lack that kind of distant vision that Christians need to live by. So Jesus said, "The light of the body is the eye." If you go to the Old Testament, it says that he that hastens to be rich has an evil eye.

That's an interesting comment there in the Old Testament. And that's what he says. If your eye be evil, your whole body will be filled with darkness. And so I really do believe the reason why many wrong decisions get made at the individual level, at the church level, is because people have not dealt with this whole issue of possessions. And Jesus said, "Don't lay up treasures on earth. Your heart's going to be where your treasure is, and it's going to affect your ability to see." And then the last thing he said is, "You cannot serve God and mammon. You can't serve both because this has to do with worship." The word worship is the old English word for worthship, W-O-R-T-H-S-H-I-P.

The word we use is a contraction. It has the T-H taken out of it. So worship had to do with values. Now we're back to values. Worship has to do with what you value most. Whatever that is, that's what you're worshiping. And many people who say that they're worshiping Jesus, if you listen to them, they're very passionate about everything but Jesus. They're passionate about their money. They're passionate about their vacations. They're passionate about their pleasures. They're passionate about all kinds of things.

But I think a person's values is most indicated by his passion. What you're the most excited about is the thing that you value. And for most people who say they're Christians, that isn't Jesus. It's their stuff. And so then now we're back to values and faith and all of that. Values are very important, and that's why I think this is such a huge issue. In fact, there are 38 parables in the New Testament. 16 of them, almost half of them, have to do with money and possessions. Somebody has said one out of 10 verses in the Gospels has to do with money.

That's 288 verses in all. In the whole Bible, there are 500 verses on prayer. There are 200 verses on faith, and there are 2,000 verses on money and possessions. So this is a very important subject. In fact, I don't think that the Gospel addresses any subject more than this except the kingdom of God itself.

But this is a far greater subject in focus in the Gospels than any other subject. And that's why it's a mystery to me that so little focus has been on this. I grew up in churches where I don't think I ever heard a sermon on it. If you heard a sermon on stewardship, it was about investing your money and making it grow so you'd have more to give. It was sort of a Gospel defense of the American dream from the parable of the talents.

But I don't think I ever heard a sermon that you should do what Jesus did. Though he were rich, yet he became poor. He voluntarily let that go so that he could focus on the things that need to be focused on. So that's what you have. Don't lay up treasures on earth because it will affect your heart. It will register as a desire that will overshadow other desires. Number two, if you don't get, if you accumulate wealth on this earth, you will be focused on the temporal. You will be focused on the material. You will not be able to see afar off. You will not see right. You will not make long-range decisions. And number three, you cannot really worship if you're focused on things.

Well, you'll be worshiping, but you'll be worshiping them because you cannot serve God and mammon. You will worship the thing that has the most worth to you, not in words, but in actuality. And so that's why this is a very important subject for everybody to get right. So their value system is right. So they're men of faith. So they're men who can see.

So they're truly worshiping God. So yes, that's my answer, long answer to your short question. Well, that's really helpful, though, to get the context of where you're coming from because this next question is going to touch on something specific of that. You've spoken in the past about how inequality as iniquity or something to that effect in some of your other sermons. So in anticipation of common criticisms, could you respond to the idea that fairness and justice are always out of reach since, to quote Jesus, "The poor you will always have with you, and if anyone is unwilling to work, he shall not eat"? How would you respond to people that might have those criticisms? We are taught that we are to work to provide for practical needs, not only our own, but our relatives.

As far as the poor of the world, yes, we will never meet all the needs. And the focus is not on whether we meet all the needs of the poor. The focus is on what are we doing with our resources. The focus is on what we're doing, not necessarily how much of the need gets met. We will never meet all of the needs, of course. But the focus is on what am I doing with the resources that I have. So this whole inequality as iniquity aspect, that's what you're saying. You're hitting it more from the angle of what are we doing instead of the fact that, "Hey, there's inequality in the world, therefore there's something wrong with us."

Well, let me back up just a little bit. We are talking about a Christian community. We believe in two kingdoms. We believe the local congregation is the practical expression, as far as we're concerned, of the kingdom of God here and now in our situation. And yes, equality in that society should be of great concern to us. There should be no poor in the church. There should be no rich in the church. There should be fluid assets. 2 Corinthians 8:15 clearly lays it out that your abundance may serve for their need. Their abundance may serve. And so the assets we have as a brotherhood should be fluid.

Wherever the need is, that's where the money goes. Wherever the money is, that's where the need is going to be met. And yeah, there should really be equality. It'll never be perfect, of course, but that should be our passion. Our passion should be that if somebody came to visit our churches, they would visit around and they'd say, "Well, the houses are about the same. The cars are about the same. People seem to have their needs met. There are no poor people here. There are no rich people here." That should be our testimony. Okay. So that statement, you're not necessarily applying it to the whole planet because there's inequality financially among many different people. You're not saying quite so much.

You're focusing in on the church and ourselves and how we're living that. Well, I would say that the church and individual Christians would have a passion to create as much—I hate to use the word equality because that's never really going to happen—but to see that as much of our resources as possible gets to as many needs of the world as possible. Yes.

In fact, it was estimated that, I think, I don't know if I have this figure right, that $15 billion would basically provide the nutrition for every person in the world, and there'd be nobody starving. Now, $15 billion is a lot of money, but when you think in terms of the kind of money that we have as a nation, when you think even of the kind of money we have as a Mennonite church, that figure is not too far out of reach that we could actually feed every person in the world.

That's not an awful lot of money in terms of national economics. So that gives a little bit of an idea of what's happening. There's a lot of money concentrated at one place that doesn't get shared. And Jesus wants to completely destroy that mentality. God never wanted that to happen. That's very helpful clarification. I'm curious what our audience is going to think. And if they have questions, y'all can leave them down in the comments below.

But as we wrap up this section here, could you name a few resources you would recommend for people to get a better understanding of what you've been describing here? I have not studied this subject much outside the Bible itself, but I would recommend Roger Hertzler's book, Through the Eye of a Needle.

James Stayer is a man who did a lot of study on Anabaptist economics. He wrote a piece. I don't know if it's a book or if it's an essay. I know he did write a book on the subject, but I don't know the title of the book, Economics in the Anabaptist. That would be good to read for our own people. But no, I don't have a lot of resources. Sure. Outside of start studying the Bible and see what it says. You know, Mennonites, if there's one verse in the Bible, they'll go all out to obey that one verse.

If they would just actually listen to what Jesus said and quit rationalizing and quit saying, "It doesn't say where your treasures are where your heart be also." What it really says is where your heart is, that's where your treasure is. So you can have a huge appalled stuff and tell people your heart isn't there. That's the kind of theological gymnastics that we like to do with what Jesus actually said. Or he told that rich man to sell his stuff because he had a special problem, which of course we don't have. So that's why God had to tell him that. The interesting thing is in Luke chapter 12, he says the very same thing. "Sell that you have and give alms; provide for yourselves bags which wax not only treasure in the heaven that faileth not."

And he's talking to everybody. He's talking to the disciples. He's not just talking to the rich man. But that's the kind of stuff we do with the parables. With Jesus' teaching, we take the talents and, well, Jesus says you're supposed to invest and make things increase.

And we just totally overlook everything else he said on the subject. Wow, that's really helpful. That's a really neat perspective. Thank you for coming on and sharing this with me and the rest of our audience. And yeah, thank you all for watching, and we'll catch you in the next episode. Thank you for joining us for this episode, and thanks to our donors and partners for making this possible. For more episodes, please subscribe or visit our website at anabaptistperspectives.org. You can also leave a comment or review to help more people find our content.