Avarice is obviously a timely topic. Our current economic downturn is often attributed to greed grown out of control. For many of us, it’s unclear how greed is causally related to our economic troubles, but we’re usually ready to believe those who tell us that there is a correlation between the unbridled pursuit of profits in the financial sector of our economy and the current recession. We are suffering because, it seems, some became too greedy. We continue to be troubled, moreover, that some make millions in bonuses without any reason to assume that there is a connection between the bonus and the work they have done. Greed seems to have no limits or shame.
That we are able to make such judgments presumes that we know what we’re talking about when we talk about greed. I think, moreover, that presumption may be just that—that is, a presumption. The desire for money may be an indication of greed, but I hope to try to help you see that greed is a much more subtle vice than simply the desire to be rich. It is interesting, however, that even if avarice is understood primarily as the desire for wealth, we seldom hear sermons about greed. That we do not hear sermons seems strange, because at least as far as the New Testament is concerned, greed is considered to be much more of a threat to the ability to follow Christ than, for example, lust.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says quite clearly, “You cannot serve God and wealth.” Paul confesses in Romans 7 he would not have known sin if he had not known the many forms of covetousness that possessed his life—if the law had not said “You shall not covet.” In 1 Timothy 6:10, Paul even suggests that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, leading some to wander away from the faith because of the self-inflicted pains they have suffered due to their desire for money. At least one of those pains greed produces is identified as idolatry in Colossians 3:5. In the book of James, Christians are unrelentingly chastised for thinking they can delay doing God’s will, in order, as James says, to go to this town or that town to do business and make money. Such people simply fail to realize that their wealth will not save them from miseries or death, James says. Indeed, he’s very blunt. You want something and you do not have it, so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it so you engage in disputes and conflicts.
Scripture seems clear: If you are a Christian who is wealthy or desires to have wealth, you’ve got a problem. Yet in our day, greed is seldom identified as a major problem for Christians. Lust, which is usually associated with sexual misconduct, seems to have become the sin that Christians worry about. I confess it’s not clear to me why that is the case, but it may be we think we know what it looks like when we’re under the power of lust. For all the changes alleged to be characteristic in our sexual conduct, it is still assumed that we can spot promiscuity or adultery as indications of lust. We assume that such behavior can be attributed to lust understood as out of control sexual desire. Yet I suspect that greed grips our lives more than lust, but we fail to focus on greed because we’re not sure we know how to identify what greed looks like. Two SUVs? Indeed, I’m of the opinion that what is often identified as lust may actually be a form of greed. The very fact that the lust that grips so many lives is never satiated suggests that lust, in fact, has become a form of greed in our lives. For if any one characteristic is to be associated with greed, it is the presumption that no matter how much we may have, we need more. We need more because we cannot be sure that what we have is secure. So the more we have, the more we must have, in order to secure what we have.
Bill May observes that the vices in traditional catalogs of sins were often associated with various body parts. Lying, with the tongue; lust, with the genitals; gluttony, with the throat; pride, with the chest; conceit, with the turned head; but avarice, with the arms. The person possessed by avarice was associated with lengthy arms because they were a person that constantly was grasping for the goods of another. Things come into the possession of the greedy, therefore, by reaching and holding. Mastery and possession are the marks of a person determined by avarice. That greed names the felt necessity to have more may help explain the seeming paradox that greed seems to have become a particularly prominent challenge in economics of plenty. It is quite interesting, for example, that with the rise of money economies in Western Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries there is distinct increase in references to the sin of greed by theologians and bishops. Money, it seems, allowed more people to manifest signs of wealth, which meant the more wealth they had, the more wealth they needed to sustain the wealth they had. For the rich, there’s never enough.
I do not mean to suggest that avarice only became a named vice with the development of money economies. The rise of monasticism clearly was the crucial development necessary for the articulation of the seven deadly sins. Augustine would identify pride as the cardinal, or original, sin. But the monks who inhabited the Egyptian desert thought greed to be the sin that birthed other sins. They observed a deep human fear of dependency on God that manifested itself in the perennial desire to accumulate some small margin of protective, sustaining property. That monasticism preceded the identification of avarice as the primal sin is a nice confirmation that our very ability to name sins is a theological achievement. In other words, the very presumption that we can name our sins and declare that we are sinners prior to God’s grace is an indication that we are possessed by sin. You only know sin on your way out of it. You only know how to name it in the face of a prior righteousness.
Accordingly, a community must exist as the monks existed that makes possible the identification and subtlety of sin. That is particularly true when you’re dealing with a sin as subtle as greed. I think, for example, it’s not accidental that you needed a St. Francis for the discovery by Christians that we had lost the ability to recognize how greed possessed our lives. The subsequent development of the Franciscan order was crucial for the acknowledgement by the Church that the Church itself was possessed by possessions. Yet the very Order that had as its center the discipline of begging was soon able to make holiness a commodity subject to greed. William Langland, in Piers Plowman, depicts the friars ability to turn their alleged sanctity into a means to acquire money. Langland characterized the friars in the words of Kelly Johnson as “hawkers of holiness,” who are “all the more prone to simony because of their practice of poverty and begging.” Thus, in the prologue to Piers Plowman, the dreamer says:
“I found there friars from all four orders, preaching to people to profit their gut and glossing the Gospel to their own good liking, coveting fine coats some of these doctors contradicted authorities. Many of these masterful mendicant friars bend their love of money to their proper business, and since charity’s become a broker and chief agents for the Lord’s confessions, many strange things have happened these last years. Unless Holy Church and charity clear away such confessors, the world’s worst misfortunes mount up fast.”
Langdon’s suggestion that the worst misfortunes “mount up fast” might well be a description of our situation. That a poem like Piers Plowman could be written suggests that the poet could still drawn on the tradition to show what greed looks like and why it is such a threat to Christians.
But it’s unclear if such is the case with us. For greed has become the necessary engine to sustain economic growth. We are obligated to want more, because if we do not want more, we think we will put someone else out of a job. So spend, spend, spend.
For example, in his book Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street, Jim Wallis calls attention to this adulation of greed by the Wall Street tycoon Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street. In the midst of the hostile takeover of the fictional company Teldar Paper, Gecko declares “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right; Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all its forms—greed for life, money, love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the United States of America.”
Gecko’s praise of greed, of course, found it’s most original, elegant, and persuasive form in Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of The Bees. Mandeville writes, “Vast numbers thronged the fruitful hive; / Yet those vast numbers made ‘em thrive; / Millions endeavoring to supply / Each Other’s Lust and Vanity. / Thus every Part was full of Vice, / Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.” From Mandeville’s perspective, “frugality is like honesty—a mean, starving virtue that is only fit for small societies of good, peaceful men who are contended to be poor so that they may be easy. But in a large, stirring nation, you may soon have enough of frugality.”
Dierdre McCloskey has tried to qualify Mandeville’s account of the necessity of avarice for economic growth by arguing that markets depend upon communities of virtue for which economists often fail to account. William Schweiker suggests that because property is a cultural construction entangled with arrangements for human identity and worth, it may be that what we call greed should be better understood as an appropriate desire necessary to sustain market-driven economies.
I’m not convinced however that McCloskey and Schweiker’s language-transforming proposals to understand greed, even in a limited way, as a good is a good idea. For example, Alasdair MacIntyre observes that for those shaped by the habits of modern societies, it is assumed as a fundamental good that acquisitiveness is a character trait indispensible to continuous and limitless economic growth. From such a standpoint, it is inconceivable that a systematic lower standard of living can be conceived as an alternative to the economics and politics of peculiarly modern societies. For such societies, prices and wages have to be understood to be unrelated so that dessert in terms of labor, notions of just price and just wage, according to MacIntyre, no longer make any sense. Yet a community shaped by the virtues that would make greed a vice—that is, a community shaped by the virtue of temperance—would have to set strict limits to growth insofar that is necessary to preserve or enhance a distribution of goods according to dessert.
That we find it hard to conceive of an alternative to limitless economic growth is an indication of our spiritual condition. It is a condition well understood by the monks who thought the desire for honor and power to be an expression of the felt need to control the world around us so that we might be more godlike in control of our world. Thus, Cassian saw anger as one of the forms greed takes in those who no longer cling to the one alone who can provide stability. Deprived of God, we become self-absorbed, seeking in external goods a satisfaction for our inner emptiness. When those goods fail, we turn on others, as well as ourselves, as a way to hide the emptiness of our lives.
In The City of God, Augustine suggest that the Roman elites indulged in various forms of luxury and elicit pleasures to distract them from the inevitability of death. He observes that “the essential context for ambition is a people corrupted by greed and sensuality.” And greed and sensuality in a people is a result of that prosperity which the great Nasica in his wisdom maintained should be guarded against when he opposed the removal of a great and strong and wealthy enemy state. He opposed the removal of the enemy. His intention was that lust should be restrained by fear and should not issue in debauchery. And the check on debauchery should stop greed from running riot.
So you use one vice against another vice and you will need an enemy therefore to control the kinds of vices you need to control each of the other vices.
One of the ways to think about this, if you wanted to transpose what I’m trying to say to the international realm—just think how the United States never has enough power. That’s greed. The more power you need the more power you will need to make sure that the power you have is safe. So, you never, if you are an imperial country, you never have enough power. Because you’re assuring the people that make up such a politics that you will protect them from having to come to terms with their death.
Augustine, according to Robert Dodaro, argued that the fear of death—the fear that their lives would not be remembered—meant that Roman elites lived in the fear of the loss of status and comfort. They were greedy for glory, hoping by glory that their lives might have significance. Empire was the means of sustaining status and well-being, but empire also produced an ever increasing social anxiety about annihilation. As a result, the Romans became over-dependent on military force. Dodaro observes that, from Augustine’s perspective, the Romans were caught in a vicious cycle that linked the threat of annihilation with an ever-growing political and military response to foreign threats, disseminating anxiety throughout the empire to such an extent that even inhabitants of Roman Africa were alarmed by the Visigothic assault on Rome. America, the strongest nation in the world, runs on fear.
Of course, we may think that the Romans are Romans, and we are not. We assume, therefore, we are not subject to the same death-denying greed that characterized the lives of Roman pagans. Henry Fairlee, however, has given an account of how greed grips our lives, an account that echoes the suggestion in the book of James that there is a connection between greed and war. That sounds very much like Augustine’s characterization of the Romans. Fairlee suggests that we are a people harassed by greed, just to the extent that our greed leads us to engage in unsatisfying modes of work so that we may buy things we have been harassed into believing will satisfy us. We complain of the increasing tempo of our lives, but that is a reflection of the economic system we have created and now think we must sustain. We know, moreover, no other way to keep the system going, other than the threat of war. We tolerate the world shaped by our avarice because the world, in return, temptingly and cunningly makes us believe there’s no alternative to a world so constituted.
I do not mean to suggest that it is only with the development of capitalist economic systems that we have lost the ability to recognize greed, or even we are able to think it a moral liability. For example, in a sermon on Luke 16:19-31, Luther observed that the rich and arrogant people of his day no longer heed the warning contained in the story of the rich man and Lazarus. They do not because the rich think of themselves as pious and without greed. They are able to do so because vice has been turned into virtue in their lives. Greed has come to be viewed as being talented, smart, and carefully a steward. Therefore, Luther says, neither prince nor peasant, nobleman nor average citizen, is any longer considered greedy, but only upstanding. The common consensus being that the man who prudently provides for himself is a resourceful person who knows how to take care of himself. Luther, obviously, said that in the 16th century, so it’s not just capitalism. People have always been greedy. Modern economic societies are just the first time it’s become a necessary vice to sustain our lives.
Now I’m sure many of you do not think of yourselves as greedy. After all, you’re students. You have not yet become actors in the world of wealth in a manner that might tempt you to become greedy. You are still, on the whole, without possessions, so you think you cannot be greedy. Of course, such of you may fail to recognize that to be poor—or, at least, not rich—is no guarantee that our lives may not be possessed by greed. However, I want to call your attention to a celebrated virtue often commended for students that I think exhibits Luther’s suggestion of what a subtle creature we are, insofar as we are able to turn greed into a virtue.
In his important book Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar, Paul Griffiths provides a telling account of curiosity. I’m sure you’ve been commended for being curious. Curiosity, according to Griffiths, has a very interesting history. We may not be able to imagine a world without avarice, but on the whole we still think avarice to be problematic. According to Griffiths, however, though we think curiosity to be a commendable virtue that scholar and student should try to develop, that has not always been the case. According to Griffiths, prior to modernity, curiosity was universally thought to be a vice. It was so because curiosity was an ordering of the affections, a form of love by which the knower sought to make that which they knew unique to themselves. The curious desired to create new knowledge in an effort to give them control over that which they knew. By dominating that which they came to know, they could make what they knew a private possession. Curiosity is, then, in brief, an appetite for the ownership of new knowledge. The curious seek to know what they do not yet know. As a result, that which they come to know ravishes them by enacting what Griffiths describes as a “sequestered intimacy.” Griffiths use of the language of sequestering is used to suggest that the curious think that what they have come to know is for their exclusive use. The curious assume they are masters of what they have come to know, therefore. Because they claim what they know is peculiar to them, they seek as well as create envy in those who do not know what they know. Just think about any classroom and you will see that.
In a way not unlike Augustine’s understanding of the place of the spectacle for the Romans, Griffiths suggest that the curious seek spectacles to distract them from the loneliness that is the necessary result of their desire to possess what they have come to know. The desire for novelty—the desire to have knowledge that I alone can possess—produces a restlessness that is inflamed, rather than assuaged, by the spectacles it constructs. Curiosity, so understood, is the intellectual expression of the greed correlative to an economic system built on the need to have those that make up a system to always want more. The alternative to curiosity, according to Griffiths, is studiousness. Studiousness, like curiosity, entails an ordering of the affections and is therefore a form of love. But the studious do not seek to sequester, own, possess, or dominate what they hope to know. They want to participate lovingly in it, to respond to it knowingly as a gift rather than a potential possession, to treat it as icon, rather than as spectacle. For the studious, what they know can be loved and contemplated, but not dominated by the sequestration. The studious, therefore, accept as a gift what they have come to know, which means they assume that that which they know is known in common because it is part of a shared way of life. The contrast between the curious and the studious will be determined, according to Griffiths, by their willingness or unwillingness to share what they know with others. This, in a very interesting way, renders at least discussable whether “plagiarism” is always a bad thing. Most of the theology of the church is plagiarism from one generation to the next. It by necessity requires sharing.
Whether we are or are not possessed by our possessions can only be determined to the extent we are ready to give away that which we have. Griffiths associates such a willingness to share our knowledge of Christ just to the extent that the degree to which any of us know Christ and what the Gospel is and demands is the degree to which we must share that knowledge by giving it away. The studious Christian, therefore, seeks, in Griffiths’s words, a participatory intimacy driven by wonder and riven by lament, which makes it impossible for them to seek ownership of what they have been given. For Christians believe that all Christians have been brought into being God out of nothing. Accordingly, the studious recognize that only God possesses or owns any creature. Only God, therefore, has the power to sequester any being into privacy or to grant it public display.
Alms—the sharing of what we know is a form of almsgiving—is rightly understood not as giving away what is ours, but rather is making available to others what was God’s before we had a use for it. When you give alms, you’re not giving yours, you’re giving God’s. And if you think you’re giving yours, you’re possessed by greed. So exactly what it means to share is to know it’s not yours. Greed is rightly called a deadly sin because it kills the possibility of a proper human relationship to the Creator. Greed presumes and perpetuates a world of scarcity and want, a world where there’s never enough because we believe we are always living in a zero-sum game. Therefore, if I am honored, you are not—you lose. But as Sam Wells has argued, a world shaped by scarcity is a world that cannot trust that God has given all that we need. Greed, interestingly enough, is a deadly sin because it prohibits faith. But the contrary is true. Wells reminds us that the problem is not that there is ever too little in God, but that God is always too much for us to take in. Overwhelmed by God’s inexhaustible creation, limitless grace, relentless mercy, enduring purpose, fathomless love, we turn away, finding such a God too much to contemplate, assimilate, or understand. And so Wells reminds us it is in the Eucharist that we have the prismatic act that makes possible our recognition that God has given us everything we need. The Eucharist not only is the proclamation of abundance, but it is the enactment of abundance. In the Eucharist, we discover we cannot use Christ up. In the Eucharist, we discover that the more the body and blood of Christ is shared, the more there is to be shared. The Eucharist, therefore, is the way the church learns to understand why generosity, rather than greed, must and can shape our economic relations.
The good news is that we’ve been given all we need in order not be possessed by greed. The good news is that we worship a God who, through our worship of Him, makes it possible for us to recognize that although we may be possessed by greed, through confession and repentance, we can be forgiven and maybe even learn to be temperate. Forgiveness, moreover, is the gift of grace that turns our lives of entitlement into lives of humility and gratitude. Christians are terrible: we want to be forgivers, but we do not want to be forgiven. Because if we are forgivers, we remain in control. When we are forgiven, we are out of control. To learn, therefore, to be forgiven, to be able to accept the gift of forgiveness without regret—try that; try accepting the gift of forgiveness without regret—is the condition that makes possible the recognition that all we have we have because God shared God’s life with us, making possible our ability to share our lives with one another.
There is an alternative to the world shaped by greed and avarice, the world that has shaped each of us. The alternative to the world of greed is a people of participation in worship through which we become, through the Father’s love of us through the Son, love that cannot be used up, so that the world may know a people exist who are not possessed by greed.
QUESTIONER 1: If I heard you correctly you said that it is greedy to collect wealth and use it as what we now think of as being a “good steward.” Is that correct?
HAUERWAS: That’s right.
QUESTIONER 1: How would you reconcile that with God calling husbands to provide for their families and for us to provide for others?
HAUERWAS: The language of stewardship was fundamentally an invention of Methodism by John Wesley, who said that Christians can make a lot of money as long as they act as good stewards of it, thereby giving the impression that I’m not possessed by my money because I know that I’m ready to give it away if I need to. I’ve always thought that if that way of thinking works, I would rather have an attitude problem toward a Porsche rather than my 1984 Accura Integra.
Obviously part of what I worry about is how self-deception is embodied in the very presumption, “Oh, I have a lot, but I need a lot in order to make my family work, and that’s all a matter of stewardship. And it’s mine, I made it, and I need to make it in order to make the whole system work.” How to not let that attitude privatize us as Christians in a way that isolates us into the world of greed I think is a great challenge.
A few years ago I was giving a lecture at Houston Baptist University, which had established a business school, and because they were Southern Baptists they wanted it to be ethical. So they had endowed an ethics lecture, and I was the second ethics lecturer. At the meal before the lecture the associate dean of the school had told me she was a member of Second Baptist Church of Houston, Texas, which grows between 50 and 100 every Sunday. The title of my lecture was “Why Business Ethics is a Bad Idea,” and I was critiquing the notion of quandary ethics—what do you do in making this decision, that decision—and when I finished she said “Well this just sounds so cynical, isn’t there something we can do?” And I said, “Well yes, I think there is, but it’s far too late—by the time they get too business school they’re too corrupt, there’s nothing you can do. I think you need to start at Second Baptist Church of Houston, Texas, and that is before you let anyone join the church of Second Baptist Church of Houston, Texas, you ought to ask them to turn around to the congregation and say what they make in public. ‘I make $185,000 a year, I want to be a member of Second Baptist Church of Houston, Texas.’ ‘I make $50,000 a year, I want to be a member of Second Baptist Church of Houston, Texas.’ And so on.” She said, “Well we couldn’t do that!” And I said, “Well, why?” And she said, “Well that’s private.” I said, “Where are the Fundamentalists when you need ’em?” [Laughter and applause.] I mean, God knocked off Ananias and Sapphira in the book of Acts for not being willing to share what they made.
So what I would want in response to your question is to ask, what are the practices in the congregation in which your parents exist that they have some chance of not being possessed by what they possess, in a way that they are thereby understood to be made vulnerable to the whole congregation. And I don’t think the language of stewardship is going to do that.
QUESTIONER 2: What is the opposite of greed? Is it generosity, or is it temperance? Is it liberality, or frugality?
HAUERWAS: It’s primarily temperance. The brief reference to MacIntyre in my lecture, and how temperance might well encourage us to want less, and what that might do the economy—what you hear in MacIntyre is how the language of the virtues, which oftentimes are thought to be personal, involve a significant politics that transforms—I mean, what would it mean for New York City to be shaped by the virtue of temperance? It seems to me it would be a major thought experiment in terms of how we would be organizing our lives with one another. So generosity is a nice test of how we understands that possessions are gifts in the beginning, but temperance is the virtue that is the opposite to the vice of greed.
QUESTIONER 2: So is it possible to be greedy and generous at the same time?
HAUERWAS: Yes. It’s at least possible to be greedy and appear generous at the same time, and we’re very good at that.
QUESTIONER 3: I would like to know if you think basically that the problem of greed is that we love what we are greedy for. For instance, the greed for money—is it greed because we love money? And on top of that, I’m just thinking, one of our mottoes here at King’s is “God, money, power.” [Indistinct audience noise.] And I’m curious, since money solves so many problems, what’s wrong with wanting a lot of it so that you can solve a lot of problems?
HAUERWAS: Is that true, “God, money, and power?”
QUESTIONER 3: Yes. [Loud, indistinct audience noise.]
HAUERWAS: I always refer to Fr. Hessburgh, and I’m a deep admirer of Fr. Hessburgh, but he entitled his autobiography *God, Country, Notre Dame*, and it was unclear what priorities came first. Money is an empty signifier that is a mode of exchange that creates an abstraction that gives me the illusion that the more I’ve got, no one’s hurt. And so I do think how to demystify in the Marxist language the “fetishization of money” is a major challenge for Christians today. Another name for money is loneliness. “If I have enough of it, I don’t need anyone.” And exactly what Christianity is is training in being dependent and needy. So money’s a problem.
QUESTIONER 3: May I ask then, If we’re learning to think Christianly about all aspects of reality, including money, might not there be a redemptive approach to money that is not dependent, or one based on loneliness, but one based on a true way of seeing it? Because it’s a reality that we have to address.
HAUERWAS: Probably. But when I say money is an abstraction, what I mean by that—and it is an abstraction in the Marxist sense, that it abstracts some people’s labor from what they do, and therefore their work is separated from who they are in a manner that means that they are not able to have the kind of activity in which what they do is who they are. I’m a Ruskin craft guy, and how money defeats the crafts is a very important concern that I have, and I think you should have. How money can adequately reflect community in a non-exploitive manner is a mode of investigation that none of us know how to do. But we have to do it.
QUESTIONER 4: Again, thank you for being here, Professor Hauerwas. My question sort of links back to the first question. A word that is often associated with stewardship here at The King’s College is the Greek term “economon,” and that’s usually linked with the parable of the talents. How do you believe we are to understand that parable and how it’s now often related to stewardship?
HAUERWAS: Well, the way the parable is used to say, “Hey, don’t bury it in the ground, but you gotta go out and invest it in the stock market,” I think is absolutely perverse. [Applause.] Because the talent that each of them were given is Jesus Christ. Not money. It’s Jesus Christ. And what it means to have Jesus Christ is you must be ready to share him. That’s the reason why I don’t want any of you to have a personal relationship with Jesus. I recently read a monk who was asked if he had a personal relationship with Jesus, he said no, he liked to share him. But the talents are Jesus and the absolute necessity of what it is to be possessed by Jesus means you must be a witness, which will grow. And that’s called a Christological reading of the New Testament, that most people no longer know how to practice.
QUESTIONER 5: You mentioned earlier in your speech that monasticism brought a means of clarification of what exactly the sins were and how to deal with them. What is the role of modern monasticism, and has that duty of expounding on sins, is that still part of monasticism or has that been moved to somewhere else?
HAUERWAS: Absolutely. No monasticism, no Christianity. The very fact that the Protestant tradition has largely lost the gifts that come through monasticism is a deep problem of why we have no resistance to being bourgeois. Therefore how the monks have to examine their lives in connection with one another to discover the self-deceptions that holy people are peculiarly susceptible to is a skill we all need today. Part of what I was trying to do was to help us see how hard it is to locate—I mean, don’t think of sin as something you do. Think of it as that which possesses you and you cannot name it. And knowing how to name it comes through the gifts others give us by telling us who we are. So, you’ve got to always be in a context that your enemy will tell you the truth. And don’t forget, your enemy is God. So, the monks are very good about that. I’ve always been a bit suspicious of whether you ought to talk about a “primal sin”—Augustine thought pride was, the Egyptian monks thought avarice was—[the sins] are all interconnected in ways that make them all the harder to discover as possessions that seize our lives in a manner that makes us unable to see how we deny God.
QUESTIONER 6: Thank you profusely for your lecture. At least since the Lydian society human societies have had coins with engraved images on them. One of the ten commandments is “to not have among ye any graven images.” We spend more hours per week chasing money than we do with our families or in worship, so would that make us idolaters in worshiping graven images?
HAUERWAS: Yes. That’s the reason why I suggested in Collosians that Paul made the connection between avarice and idolatry. Because it’s not just the image on the coin, but it’s exactly that through avarice we create finite goods we cannot live without, and that’s idolatry. And it’s very hard to see it in that way.
QUESTION 7: Good evening, thank you for being here tonight. I understand what you’re saying about avarice and the dangers of money controlling Christians—especially “you cannot serve God and mammon.” Am I correct in understanding that you said the principles of good stewardship were invented by the Methodists?
HAUERWAS: Yes.
QUESTIONER 7: It’s hard for me to look at the parable of the talents and see that. When I look at the Bible and I see that Abraham certainly was not poor, Joseph of Arimathea, the man who purchased the tomb where Christ was buried was not a poor man, and then I would ask, how would you advise Christians to apply this practically today?
HAUERWAS: Well, I gave the answer about the talents. But one, let me recommend a book by Kelly Johnson, it’s called The Fear of Beggars. Have you ever asked yourself, how did Jesus live? He must have begged! As far as we know, he didn’t work a day. And therefore begging has always been at the heart of Christianity, that we have to learn to be beggars. If you don’t know how to beg, you’ll never know how to pray——
QUESTIONER 7: From God, or for man?
HAUERWAS: ——oh, for you. Adam Smith was a great philosopher, and economist. And at the heart of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, what Smith wanted to do was get rid of beggars. He didn’t want anyone to depend on anyone else, through the elimination of begging, and the way you did that was through division of labor, not in and of itself the market. Through division of labor, we become dependent on one another and therefore create more wealth for everyone by everyone following their own interest. That’s the reason why he was against the corn laws, because he wanted people to be able to move from diocese to another where they could get a job, and so on. The whole point of having a system of avarice in which you allegedly create more wealth is to eliminate beggars, which Christians always need—beggars. But we don’t want beggars because we think they must be lazy or shiftless or so on. St. Francis was a beggar. He forced his friars into learning to beg. So, I know that that sounds so counter-cultural for us, we think, you’ve got to be crazy, but that’s what I think is the case.
Now, if you’ve got money—and God knows how you got it—I’ve never been any good at it; I would like to be good at it, but I’m just not any good at it—if you get money, you must always get it as a beggar, and know how therefore to hopefully not think of it as yours, and that it doesn’t dominate your life. Now, as I said, there’s no virtue in being poor. It just means that the poor have the advantage of not being in control, and so they might have some hope of knowing how to negotiate life in prayer. That’s all I can say on that.
QUESTIONER 7: I just feel like if I don’t have money—I mean, you can always be giving of your heart and your services—but I feel like if you have money, you can also give it away, following more closely to the biblical instructions. And then, what does this look like to day? Are we to become less materialistic? Move out on our own? Detach ourselves from society?
HAUERWAS: We wouldn’t know how. I mean, part of what I was saying, we wouldn’t know how to become less materialistic. We wouldn’t know how! And that should tell us a lot about our problems and the challenge before us. One of the things I fear is American democracy is a plutocracy that depends upon the best peasantry the world has ever created. It’s called the American middle class, that depends on having a lot of goods, that they don’t care whose ruling, as long as you don’t take their stuff. You start letting them lose their stuff and you watch the reactionary character of this country. It’s going to be fearful. So what would it mean for Christians to be a witness in a country that’s as wealthy as it can possibly be, which means that you and your children will not have as much as your parents did? Are you ready to start living that? I mean, that’s what’s coming. And that’s a deep challenge for the church.
QUESTIONER 8: Good evening, thank you for being here. Since we as Christians need to work to remove greed from our lives, and since, as you said, greed can be more than just for money and material goods, but can be for power and other things, how do we work to remove greed without having that object become another greed, something that we just can’t move without? Is there a sign or a way that you would suggest in order to do that?
HAUERWAS: Well, every American has a sign on them that says “notice me!” “Notice me!” And that’s a form of greed—“you need to notice me, but I don’t necessarily have to notice you. So, one of the things that I think is absolutely crucial to learning to live lives that are not determined by greed is to know how to be a friend. It’s just that simple. Learning how to accept the gift of friendship in a way that helps me see myself through my friend, in a way that I’m not trying to demand my friend notice me, but that my friends are people who make me more than I could be because they see me through the eyes of Christ. And that, I think, is one of the crucial institutions that we all have the possibility to live, as friendship becomes a way that we see what a gift it is and we didn’t try. That’s the best I can do.
MARVIN OLASKY: Stanley, I appreciate your coming here, and I enjoyed your speech, but I have to say that in answering some of these questions you seem to be reading from a different Bible than the one I’m familiar with. [Loud applause.] And we could go book-by-book-by-book through the Bible, but let me just give a couple of examples.
Sure, there’s charity for widows and orphans, people, let’s say, who weren’t physically capable of helping themselves, but the classic biblical poverty-fighting device was gleaning in the fields. Gleaning was hard work. The corners of the fields were left ungleaned so people who were poor could go in and work very hard, and get food for themselves and their families and probably if they worked very hard enough food so that they could sell in the marketplace and begin earning some capital. The fruit from the trees was picked from the lower branches, but the upper branches were there for the poor people to get to. It was hard work; it was doable, people could achieve, but it was hard work. You look at the narratives like the story of Ruth, and she’s working very hard through the day, she’s very commended for that.
When we get to the New Testament, we hear, and it can’t be any plainer than this, the Apostle Paul’s telling the Thessalonians “if a man does not work, he shall not eat.” And we could go through book after book after book of how this works out. Now, when there’s a famine, when there are people in great need, as the people in Jerusalem were at some point, then there’s charity, but the normal poverty-fighting process was not begging. The normal poverty-fighting process was hard work. And if you look at the early church, in the first few centuries, churches typically had what they called the “three-day rule.” When a person came, was poor and helpless, they’d provide shelter and food for the person for three days, but after that, again, if the person was able-bodied, had to work. All through Scripture, book after book, you see this through much of the history of the Christian church.
Now you do see at some time in the Middle Ages a deviation from that where begging was prominent, but that’s a deviation. That’s something different from the biblical pattern, and that’s something different from the pattern of the church through most of the centuries.
HAUERWAS: I didn’t say that every Christian has to be literally a beggar. But every Christian is a beggar vis-á-vis our relationship with God——
OLASKY: Absolutely. God’s grace is supreme.
HAUERWAS: ——and that that has to take material form. There is nothing I said, I hope, that implied that what it means to be part of a good community is to participate in the common good of that community through the kinds of work that serve that common good. But that kind of work itself is part of the sharing of the community. That’s the reason why it becomes quite disastrous to only aid the poor in a way that they become dependent without ever sensing a contribution they make to the community. So I want to think that work is part of that, but some people, you know, the work they give the community is primarily receiving. They receive. And that makes us who we are. They’re not asked to do anything other than to receive, and in the receiving, they do it without regret.
What I’m thinking of in that regard is a Jean Vanier L’Arche community, where the core members receive, and they return what they receive by giving us joy. And that is a kind of work that we all depend upon. So, I want to be careful about underwriting a “work ethic” in and of itself. Look, I was raised a bricklayer: I know work. And I work as an academic. But if you want a place where we are very tempted to idolatry, it’s work, where I cannot live without it. [Applause.] And that is part of what I was trying to say.
OLASKY: Well, I appreciate that. So we’re agreed that there are temptations to idolatry all over.
HAUERWAS: Sure.
OLASKY: There are temptations to greed everywhere. The community you spoke of is a wonderful example of Christian charity. I think we’re agreed that when there are people who are less physically or mentally capable and they need help, then this is a wonderful thing to be able to offer that help. But I guess are we also agreed that the common pattern for able-bodied Christians most of the time is work and not begging?
HAUERWAS: Sure, it’s to work. But——
OLASKY: Well, that’s good.
HAUERWAS: ——but Vanier doesn’t understand what he does as charity. He understands what he receives from the people who allow him to bathe them is charity, not what he does. And that that’s very important, because what we fear in the face of the people he bathes is their weakness, because they expose our weakness, and that that is the most fearful thing that we possibly confront.
OLASKY: Well, I agree, in a sense we allow God to bathe us, and so we learn about God’s mercy by being merciful to others, and this is a great thing. So, again, thank you for the clarification, thank you for coming here.
