Reflection:
I have two kids who are two years apart. When my daughter was born in Brigham and Women’s Hospital, I came back home to get my 2 year old son. I brought him over to the hospital, and on the way there, he stopped and picked up a little acorn from the sidewalk under a tree. He turned to me and said, ‘For Zoe?’ It was an awesome moment. Even now, we still have that acorn as a Christmas tree ornament as a symbol. It represents John’s love for his little sister, his generosity, and his thinking about her.
But, like all siblings, there have been times when they have not been so careful with one another, and they have not shared their things with each other. When they were younger, a classic situation used to be when we sat down for meals. We have are a number of kids’ plates with little animals on each plate that we have. One morning, I gave John the one with cats on it, and Zoe got the one with Cookie Monster and Elmo. Zoe said, ‘I want the kitties!!’ and proceeded to grab John’s plate. Or, another classic situation was when they want to play with the stuffed animals. Somehow between them they couldn't figure out how to share and make it work.
Now the ironic thing, of course, is that they actually own nothing. They didn’t get these things themselves. Ming and I, as their parents, own everything. They own nothing. So at any given moment we could intervene and say, ‘John gets this, Zoe gets that.’ But we want them to understand that they are stewards of one another. In the same way, if you believe in Jesus, you have siblings in God’s family. God owns everything. We own nothing. Everything we touch and feel, He owns. He shares it with us and He lets us manage some of it. It’s true that we are therefore stewards of wealth. But that is framed by the larger fact that we are stewards of something much more precious and important to God: one another.
One of the ways the New Testament talks about the new creation family of the church is to use Cain and Abel language. Cain had asked God in exasperation, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ But God’s implicit answer to that question was an emphatic ‘Yes, you are.’ God had given Cain a stewardship of his brother in love. Of course Adam and Eve messed up human relationships, and Cain went even further by killing Abel. But God sent Jesus to reverse all that, to bring peace between people who came to him, to beat swords into plowshares. In the midst of all the people around, who are generally at war with one another, Jesus creates a new family around himself. And he reminds us, ‘Are you your brother’s keeper? Your sister’s keeper? Yes you are!’ Jesus makes us a steward of our brothers and sisters in God’s new family. Whenever we find Cain and Abel language in the New Testament texts as we do in two places - James 5:4 and 1 John 3:11 - 18, we are really looking at new creation family language. And in both of these places, the New Testament says, ‘Don’t be like Cain; be true brothers and sisters to each other. Be stewards of one another.’ Right away, John tells us that this impacts our money. It goes beyond that, but it does not go lower than that.
Imagine what it would be like if you had brothers and sisters sitting at the dinner table together. What would it be like if everyone else had steak, lobster, fresh bread with melting garlic butter, fresh fruit and tangy salad, but you had only a handful of rice on your plate? And what if you asked for a little bit because you were famished and malnourished? What if people said, ‘No; you really have a work ethic problem.’ Admittedly, some people do have a work ethic problem. But the reality is, being family goes a long way. ‘Whoever has the world’s goods, and sees his brother or sister in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?’ We are stewards of one another.
The main idea behind John’s concern about the sharing of material wealth is the family of God. In this section, John says that ‘practicing righteousness’ is equivalent to ‘loving one’s brother’ (3:10). He reminds us that the call to love one another comes ‘from the beginning’ (3:11), i.e. from Jesus. John presents ‘loving one another’ as the evidence that one possesses the eternal life of the Spirit. Thus, loving one another is the mark of membership in the new covenant community (3:23-24). This reflects the same thought pattern as James, Matthew, Luke, and Paul. All take the Christian community as existing before the individual in the order of salvation. Individuals are saved into the community, so they must acknowledge and receive Jesus’ ethics for his community prior to authentic conversion. The issue is not moral perfection, but relationship and evidence of commitment, i.e. evidence of new life.
Familial sibling love is probably the best approximation for what the word ‘stewardship’ should mean. It is thoroughly consistent with Jesus’ priority of giving to the poor, because the mere fact of another’s poverty is a condition of broken brotherhood, or familial sibling responsibility. Thus, the New Testament message of new creation uniformly seeks to restore the proper human relations of the creation order, not the proper ownership of the physical creation per se. This is where the Protestant Reformation made a critical mistake: the Protestant doctrine of the stewardship of creation held that we are first and foremost stewards of the creation, but since it lacked an ethical direction, that doctrine simply led to the desire to control the creation. Hence, the Protestant doctrine of stewardship of nature led to the expansion of capitalism and the exploitation of people. But the biblical doctrine of the stewardship of one another, provided by the Cain and Abel language, seeks to address not only the outward conditions of poverty but also the relational apathy and/or hostility among the wealthy towards the poor within the new community in Jesus Christ. This means that before Christians are stewards of the natural resources of creation, we are first and foremost stewards of one another.
From this vantage point, it is easy to understand why the early Christian preachers declared that accumulated wealth was robbery of the poor, by its very nature. Ambrose: ‘Not from your own do you bestow upon the poor man, but you make return from what is his.’ John Chrysostom: ‘This also is theft, not to share one’s possessions…[he makes an analogy to a treasury official, where we are ‘stewards’ of resources for the benefit of the poor]. Not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor.’ Basil of Caesarea: ‘That bread which you keep belongs to the hungry…Wherefore as often you are able to help others and refused, so often did you do them wrong.’ Centuries later, theologians and preachers were still drawing from this deep well. Aquinas argued that all private property arrangements are subservient to the principle of human need at large: ‘In cases of need, all things are common property. There is no sin in taking private property for need has made it common.’ This teaching is not merely hyperbolic language. Nor was it coming from a context-specific situation where the rich were forcibly robbing the poor, whereas wealth acquired by ‘hard work’ would have been acceptable. No: The poor were being robbed by the rich because the rich were resisting their sibling responsibility to the poor. The early Christian preaching on sharing wealth has at its source an accurate understanding of the new creation community. It is simply a faithful transmission of the motif of Cain and Abel.
I believe that the literary development of the Cain and Abel motif throughout the biblical canon from creation to new creation fits perfectly with this. Jesus took the ‘love your neighbor’ ethic within Israel and made it the ethic facing beyond the covenant community. This is another way of saying, ‘love your enemy,’ and it is consistent with the restoration of ideal ‘sibling-to-sibling’ human relations marred by Cain and Abel. The Cain and Abel motif is therefore squarely in the service of the Great Commandment: to love one’s neighbor as one’s very self. Precisely because it is ‘creation theology’ does the New Testament concern itself materially and evangelistically with all humanity; any use of creation themes to artificially limit Christian concern to a particular subgroup makes it illegitimate.
Therefore, any observer must conclude that the vast majority of the American evangelical community is drastically inconsistent theologically. Broadly speaking, while it ardently defends God’s intent for marriage, alternating between courage and awkwardness in the face of the militant wing of the gay community, and while it sometimes correctly understands marriage in Jesus’ new creation to be empowerment to live the original, unmarred creational paradigm that Adam and Eve experienced in the beginning (although high divorce rates call this into question), by and large, that same community does not ardently defend the creational paradigm for covenant brotherhood and sisterhood, especially the intended use of wealth within the new covenant family. They do not view the accumulation of wealth by the wealthy as a significant theological problem. Instead, they tend to believe that hard work creates wealth without moral obligation. They are politically conservative with regards to the distribution of wealth, resisting interference in almost all regards, protesting about encroachment on their ‘freedom of choice’ and giving surprising levels of privilege to corporate and industrial interests. They tend to reinvest profits rather than give profits to the poor because they desire to ‘arrive,’ so to speak. They fail to recognize systemic injustices foisted upon others, particularly but not exclusively across ethnic and racial lines. They feel little to no personal responsibility for the hardships of the urban poor. And they tend to not acknowledge much responsibility to share financially with the global body of Christ, which consists largely of people in poverty. American evangelicals hold to a highly inappropriate theology about wealth that has the attractive feature of legitimating retention and control over that wealth. Therefore, they have only dimly understood what it means to be part of the ‘new creation.’
‘New creation’ means ‘new community,’ yet an ethic of communal or familial identification has been sadly lacking in evangelical reflection on ethics. In other words, in such reflections, the body of Christ as an ethical priority and a socio-political force has not been exposited, even though Scripture gives us ample basis to chart such a course. The Catholic Social Magisterium reflects a more serious attempt to do so, but there are difficulties with that tradition as well. Protestant reflections on ethics, on the other hand, while impressive in some ways, have usually centered on the individual and individual choices.[1] But a Christian banker who refuses to be concerned about the plight of poor communities, within which poor Christians live, is not simply being individually disobedient. She is identifying herself with the rich, or those in power above her, and refusing to identify herself with the body of Christ, which contains poor Christians to whom she has obligations. A Christian businessman who refuses to be concerned about Christians left unemployed by the wake of layoffs is not simply being individually disobedient. He is identifying himself with the community of his stockholders and executives, who operate by the rule of profit, rather than the community of the body of Christ, which contains poor Christians to whom he has obligations, and which operates by the rule of mercy. A Christian local city council member who only represents his own district at the expense of other low-income Christians in another district is not simply being individually disobedient. He is identifying himself communally with his power base, rather than the body of Christ, which includes poor Christians elsewhere that he can probably serve in some way; this is definitely true in school district debates, municipal decisions, etc. where affluent communities separate themselves and their resources from poor communities by gerrymandering political lines. This rhetorical strategy is probably what the apostle John means when he counsels us to not be of world, which I take to mean ethical solidarity with the community of the world. We are not to be like them.
I am not suggesting that Christians should give preferential or nepotistic treatment to other Christians. I am saying, however, that the presence of the body of Christ in multiple social strata should create a dynamic where Christians become a reconciling force across multiple communities. First, Christians are drawn out of the community of their self-interest, and into a much larger world where they must be more broadly concerned for the communities in which poor Christians reside, and to which they are ministers. Second, Christians must do evangelism at least in part by proclaiming Jesus’ ethics. Therefore they must invite non-Christians into the much larger world where they must join the Christian community in becoming part of a reconciling movement. Am I the keeper of my brother or sister? Unequivocally, the answer is ‘yes.’ We are ‘stewards’ of one another.
[1] Take for example, Richard B. Hays in The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1997); Glen Stassen and Stan Gushee in Kingdom Ethics (2002); Stanley Grenz in The Moral Quest (2002)
