Wealth, Judgment, and Grace

As any pastor knows, the two topics most people do not want to talk about, especially in church, are sex and money. Why? Because addressing issues related to sex and money often means addressing the ways we use them to fulfill some of our most profound and intimate longings and desires. Even more, when one considers issues of exploitation, oppression, and dehumanization, sex and money are often at the center of injustice, and no one wants to be seen as unjust.

That said, I will save the sex article for another day and today address the ways we view money and economics. Recently, as part of a research project, I returned to one of the most avoided New Testament passages on money, James 5:1–8:

Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you. Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord’s coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains. You too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lord’s coming is near. (James 5:1–8, NIV)

We often avoid James 5 because it confronts and rebukes affluent American, Western Christians. While James does not discuss all that the Bible has to say about wealth and resources, he does bring prophetic indictments against hoarded wealth, against wages withheld, against lives of luxury and self-indulgence, lives without regard for the suffering of others. Though there are debates about what he means, James even goes so far as to speak about the accumulation of wealth in eschatological terms, reminding us of the last days. And lest we assume this section of James is not for us, James is explicitly writing to God’s covenant community—self-proclaimed Christians.

With that in mind, the central goal of this article is to address what these indictments demand of contemporary Christians as we live amidst our capitalist, consumerist, and individualistic economic system—a system that has created great wealth, not just for others but for us.  How are we to beware the love of money (Matthew 6:24) amidst this world?

The following seeks to achieve three goals. First, we should consider what James is actually saying, including how we ought to define wealth in the first place. Second, as a Reformed pastor and theologian, I want to draw on three major voices of the Reformed tradition—John Calvin, Abraham Kuyper, and Herman Bavinck—to develop four biblical propositions that the Reformed tradition has articulated on the relationship among money, poverty, and justice. Third, I hope to conclude by providing several practical applications, grounded finally in the Christological logic of kenosis.

Before engaging James’s arguments, we must first consider what the James actually means by wealth, and who falls within his scope. In our modern context, most people in the Western church do not think of ourselves as wealthy. When we think about wealth, we often have in mind figures like Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg or other millionaires and billionaires. However, from a biblical perspective, such ultra-wealth is more akin to royalty-status levels of accumulation and affluence. This distorts how we ought to understand wealth, as it considerably skews our reading of texts like James 5.

A better way to understand wealth is to understand biblical poverty. Poverty in Scripture is most often associated with the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant. These individuals were the most vulnerable members of the community and, as a result, they were often those who could not provide for themselves or who struggled to do so. They are those like the widow speaking to Elisha in 1 Kings 17, who said she had just enough flour to make bread for herself and her son before they died. When the Bible speaks of poverty, it is speaking of those who have nothing and, as a result, cannot meet their basic needs. With that in mind, possessing wealth is better understood not only as the ability to meet one’s basic needs, such as food and shelter, but also as having significant resources remaining after meeting those needs for savings, pleasure, travel, investment, or any expenditure beyond subsistence. In other words, if we have more than we need, we likely have a measure of wealth—the only question is how much. By that standard, the overwhelming majority of readers in the Western church are wealthy. Consequently, everything James says about wealth applies to us. This definition must remain in view throughout what follows.

Once we accept that definition, what James says is confrontational. He argues that the gold and silver the wealthy have accumulated is corroding—and, more pointedly, that it is corroding them. Their hoarded wealth testifies against them in the last days. This is final judgment language, and it is addressed to people who profess faith in Christ. The question it raises is unavoidable and frightening: Does my money put into question my standing before God?

The answer James gives is consistent with his argument throughout the letter. Those who truly trust in the work of Jesus will live lives that reflect that trust. Those whose lives do not reflect obedience to what God commands have reason to examine whether their claims of faith are true at all. Ultimately, James argues that our relationship to money says something fundamental about whether our faith is genuine.

The specific indictments from James center on three concerns. In verse 3, it is hoarding or the selfish accumulation of wealth. In verse 4, it is economic injustice—the failure to pay fair wages to workers, whose cries have reached the ears of the Lord. In verse 5, it is self-indulgence—living in luxury and fattening oneself in what James calls “the day of slaughter.” Taken together, James is addressing selfishness, injustice, and the structural deformation of economic relationships. And most importantly, for James, these are not peripheral concerns. They are among the clearest indicators, in his view, of whether faith is real.

All this said, there is also far more that the Bible says about money, wealth, economics, and justice, and there is no way to cover it all in the scope of a single article. What follows, however, draws on three of the most significant voices within the Reformed tradition—John Calvin, Abraham Kuyper, and Herman Bavinck—to develop four biblical propositions relevant to James 5. These figures are not without their flaws, including in these areas of economics and justice. For example, Kuyper’s inflated view of European culture generated serious problems with which subsequent generations have had to reckon. But, with that caveat, their insights on biblical economics and God’s care for the vulnerable remain profound, and they do emphasize the demands of this passage in ways that continue to confront us today.

Proposition one: God’s compassion is most evident toward the impoverished, not the wealthy.

One area of theological ethics that bears directly on James 5 is the stream of Christian thought known as Liberation Theology, which famously argues that God has what is called a “preferential option for the poor.” The Reformed tradition approaches this idea differently than Liberation Theology, but it does affirm this central claim: God has a particular affection and compassion for the impoverished.

Calvin, in his sermon on Deuteronomy 24:14–18, argued that “God sides with the poor” and that the rich “rebel against God” when they disregard the poor, failing to affirm their humanity.^[1]  Compassion for the impoverished, he said, becomes “the mark of humanity for the rich.” Neglecting the needs of the most vulnerable, for Calvin, does not merely fail the vulnerable—it dehumanizes the wealthy who ignore or disdain them.

Further, for Calvin, an obligation to people experiencing poverty was more than acts of charity; it was fundamentally about justice. That is, “God…has laid mankind under mutual obligation to each other, that they may seek to benefit, care for, and succor each other…We must endeavor, as far as possible, that everyone should safely keep what he possesses, and that our neighbors’ advantage should be promoted no less than our own.”^[2] As has been argued, “Calvin declared that if the rich do not take the economic responsibility to assist the poor, they indeed commit a sin of murder, because they rob the needy of the indispensable source of physical life which God decided to distribute through the wealthy”^[3] and that  “the redistribution of wealth was the Christian’s responsibility as a biblical ‘duty’ to pursue public interest.”^[4] And lest one assume such obligations were confined to personal piety or purely on the basis of conscience, Elise Anne McKee rightly argues, in Calvin’s theology,

Social and economic matters are not in addendum to the worship of God; they are part and parcel of right earthly worship. No 16th-century person who followed Calvin’s theology would ever be able to separate how they ruled their subjects, nursed their sick neighbors, priced the goods in their shops, or obeyed their parents, or disciplined their children from their relationship to God.^[5]

Such a perspective is not to assume that Calvin would have promoted a form of socialism or a state-sponsored redistribution of wealth. However, for Calvin, Christians are expected to use their resources for the good of their community, especially the vulnerable. Such a responsibility is not optional but rather an obligation that flows from God’s law and, as a result, impacts the way in which one engages in economic life.

Kuyper pressed the same point further. He noted that “where poor and rich were at odds, Jesus never chose the side of the wealthier but always joined the poor.”^[6] This stands in sharp contrast to a culture that idolizes and honors the wealthy and powerful, then and now. Additionally, Kuyper was generally a proponent of what is understood as capitalism and democracy, but he argued that the rise of socialism was, in effect, God’s rebuke against Christian capitalists for their failure to lead in the pursuit of economic justice. He wrote that Christians ought to feel “ashamed” and “humiliated” because socialists—in our contemporary vocabulary, maybe better understood as the progressive left—not the church, were “invoking the name of Christ on behalf of the working class.” And when the church did finally respond to conditions of injustice, Kuyper observed, it tended to be defensive against secular approaches rather than offensively prophetic.^[7]

Proposition two: Wealth is spiritually dangerous. Most of us, by the biblical definition established at the outset, are wealthy. And wealth, the Reformed tradition insists, is spiritually dangerous. For example, Calvin and Kuyper rejected attempts to spiritualize Jesus’ words about the poor in texts like Matthew 5:3 and Luke 6:20—“blessed are the poor”—the move by which many American Christians have converted a material reality into a metaphor for humility in order to justify their relationship to money.^[8] For Kuyper, interpreting poverty in these texts only as metaphor was not a hermeneutical option but a blasphemy against Christ.^[9] He warned Christians that they were preaching only “half the gospel” when they did not proclaim “the divine mercy of the Christ of God for the socially oppressed.”^[10] Proclaiming good news to the oppressed was not, for Kuyper, a secondary application of the gospel; it was intrinsic to it. Consequently, our relationship with money may be more about our understanding of the gospel than we would like.

Further, reflecting on Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler, Kuyper was even more direct. He argued that “even a man with capital can be saved, but not unless God the Lord bestows miraculous grace on him and conveys the camel through the eye of a needle.”^[11] Capital is not spiritually neutral; it poses a profound barrier to access to kingdom of God, a barrier only overcome by a special kind of grace that brings a camel through the eye of a needle. Kuyper’s conclusion was that those who possess capital are, in a real sense, to be pitied for it—because their resources place them in a position requiring a special kind of saving grace.

The irony of modern capitalism, particularly in contexts where it has been theologically baptized as some sort of divinely-inspired economic system, is that the entire system is designed to make us camels trying to fit through the eye of a needle. It disciples us into the pursuit of wealth, and it does so relentlessly. That is not to say money is inherently evil, but the love of it is, as Scripture says, the root of all kinds of evil. Money and wealth are spiritually dangerous, and we must take that seriously.

Maybe an odd question, but I wonder: do we fear an increased paycheck, a promotion, or the closing of that big deal? If not, we should, because ever-increasing wealth leaves our soul at greater and greater risk. We must be honest about an economic system that forms us into the pursuit of the very thing that endangers us most.

Proposition three: Those not experiencing poverty miss a knowledge of God available only through proximity to the poor. In his sermon on Deuteronomy 24:19–22, Calvin emphasized that the rich and the poor must be bound together in a mutual relationship as a matter of theological importance, not merely social obligation. “God has entrusted the goods to the wealthy,” he argued, “to enable them to let their poor neighbors share in their resources.”^[12] In other words, the wealthy cannot separate their lives from the poor and remain faithful. Calvin believed the poor held what he called divine offices as “receivers” and “prosecutors,”^[13] who test the faith and love of their neighbors. In other words, God sends the impoverished to the community as a means of discernment to see whether the people of God are faithful.

The implication is significant: when our lives are detached from the impoverished, we begin to believe our possessions belong to us. Calvin argued that that belief leads to spiritual death. Isolation from the poor produces a distorted view of money and undermines our capacity to be formed by what God would give us through the experience and plight of the vulnerable. Proximity to poverty is not optional for those who wish to know God well.

Proposition four: Radical generosity is the only solution, and it is not optional. As noted, Calvin’s argument was that the goods of the wealthy are not theirs alone. They are entrusted to them for the benefit of the poor, and our resources are owed to those in need. Again, for those who might be concerned, Calvin was not necessarily advocating for some total redistribution or the abolition of private property. But he did argue that economic gain must be understood as a means of generosity, not self-enrichment, and that without generosity, we have rejected the very purpose for which God gave us our wealth.

In Book 3.7 of his Institutes, Calvin insists that neighbor-love is based not on the merit of the neighbor but solely on the image of God in our neighbor. Even when people are hostile or undeserving, they are nonetheless owed generosity not because of what they have done but because of the divine dignity they bear. As Calvin put it, we should not ask whether a person deserves our care; we must ask instead what the image of God in them deserves. Jesus makes this stunningly clear in Matthew 25: “I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” Our acts of mercy are not merely for others—they are acts of worship directed to Christ himself. It does not matter whether someone has proved themselves worthy of investment. Calvin is saying that regardless of what anyone has done, we owe them compassion for no other reason than that they bear the image of God.

Herman Bavinck adds a confronting dimension to this argument by addressing the manner of generosity rather than only its extent. Specifically, he rebukes self-oriented and performative charity on the grounds that it strips charity of its Christian character altogether. Citing Matthew 6 and 2 Corinthians 9, he insists that “giving alms ought to be done from love… quietly… without display… and cheerfully.” He goes so far as to condemn the practice of Christians using entertainment—dances, plays, concerts, lotteries, and bazaars—to raise money for charity. These, he argues, “make a mockery of true Christian benevolence” because they are not about those who suffer but about the enjoyment and recognition of those who give.^[14]

The application of this critique to contemporary Christianity is quite striking. When Christian organizations serving the vulnerable must spend lavishly in order to convince other Christians to give, something has gone wrong. When wealthy Christians gather for charity galas at opulent venues, with open bars, to determine whether an organization serving the trafficked, the marginalized, and the impoverished is worthy of their investment, it might just be a “mockery of true Christian benevolence.” When acts of charity become occasions for self-promotion or social performance, they have ceased to be Christian benevolence and become self-aggrandizement.

Given these bracing challenges, how can we avoid the trappings of wealth and ensure we are found faithful in our stewardship of resources? The following are several concrete applications. These are not offered as an exhaustive treatment but as a beginning.

First, while the New Testament Christian’s relationship to tithing—giving away ten percent of one’s income—is different than the Old Testament commands, we would be safe to assume the principle should be a baseline standard of faithfulness and stewardship. While the Old Testament tithe does not bind New Testament Christians in exactly the same way, the principle of tithing is affirmed and carried forward in the New Testament, where the bar is raised rather than lowered.

That is, the New Testament standard is sacrificial giving. That means giving to the point of real sacrifice. While there is much debate on this point, I would like to suggest that outside of a genuine crisis, such as unemployment, underemployment, or medical emergency, faithful giving should be at least ten percent of one’s income, and for those of significant means, that percentage may not be nearly sacrificial enough. Those who find themselves, outside of such circumstances, unable or unwilling to give at this much have reason to investigate whether they have developed an unhealthy relationship to money with which they have not fully reckoned.

Second, our level of generosity should alter our lifestyle in perceptible ways. Christians should live significantly below what their income could afford, precisely because of how much they give away. If our lifestyle is unchanged by our generosity, if our standard of consumption remains unaffected, we may have an unhealthy relationship to money that we are not even aware of.

Third, generosity should be considered first, not last. The biblical concept of first fruits—giving the best of one’s crop rather than the surplus after all other claims have been met—means that giving ought to occupy the first line of the budget, not the bottom. When our giving is determined by what remains after all other expenditures have been covered, it is often reduced to an afterthought, which is the precise reverse of what biblical generosity requires. The first fruits offering was not the leftovers; it was the best of what one had, offered before anything else. Again, practically speaking, generosity ought to be considered first in our budgets, and we build the rest of the budgets with what remains.

None of these demands can be sustained by guilt. God does not demand a high bar of faithfulness without also supplying the power to live accordingly, and generosity is no different. The motivation for radical generosity is not moral compulsion but the gospel itself.

Philippians 2 describes a Savior who “made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness,” who “humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” Our Savior emptied himself, left behind the treasures of heaven, and took upon himself our poverty on the cross—so that we might experience redemption. Our King made himself poor for our sake. When we take that seriously, when we actually reckon with the fact that nothing we possess is ours except by grace, the our relationship to money will be transformed.

The practice of giving generously—putting it at the top of the budget, altering one’s lifestyle, giving quietly without display, giving to those who bear the image of God regardless of whether they deserve it—becomes not a burden but a participation in the logic of Christ’s own self-giving. Radical generosity, understood this way, is not begrudging compliance with a difficult command. It is a small and imperfect reflection of Christ, and receiving it as such ought to produce joy rather than resentment.

^[1] Matthias Freudenberg. “Economic and Social Ethics in the Work of John Calvin.” HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies 65, no. 1, November 5, 2009, https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v65i1.286, 2

^[2] François Dermange, “Calvin’s View of Property: A Duty Rather Than a Right,” John Calvin Rediscovered: The Impact of His social and Economic Thought, ed. Edward Dommen and James D. Bratt (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 38. The quote is pulled from John Calvin’s Harmony of the Law 3:111, on Exodus 20:15.

^[3] Hojin Ahn,. 2022. “The Reformer at Geneva: John Calvin’s Pastoral Ministry toward the Economically Marginalized Refugees.” Korean Journal of Christian Studies 125: 35–55. https://doi.org/10.18708/kjcs.2022.7.125.1.35, 43

^[4] Ibid, 43

^[5] Dommen, 21

^[6] Kuyper, Abraham, Jordan J Ballor, and Melvin Flikkema. On Business & Economics (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2021), 189

^[7] Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma, “Christianity and Labour: Obstacles and Contributions in the Early Stages.” Comment Magazine, March 1, 2003. comment.org/christianity-and-labour-obstacles-and-contributions-in-the-early-stages/

^[8] Kuyper, Abraham, Matthew J Tuininga, and John Witte. On Charity & Justice (Belingham, WA: Lexham PKuyper concludedthe ress, 2022), ix. See, “Christ and the Needy”

^[9] Ibid, 23

^[10] Ibid, 4be

^[11] Ibid, 37

^[12] Ibid, 4

^[13] Ibid, 69

^{[14] Bavinck, Herman. Reformed Ethics, Volume 2 : Volume 2 (Reformed Ethics): The Duties of the Christian Life, edited by John Bolt, Baker Academic, 2021, 447}