It is good to be reminded of this. Kind deeds honour God, but abuse of grace is akin to shaking God’s hand while slapping his face.

Hi Dr. Ben,
What do you make of the teaching that works should necessarily flow from Christians as an indicator of conversion as opposed to works being a part of our salvation (e.g It is by grace you have been saved, not by works, lest anyone should boast.)
Many thanks for you continued posts.
In Christ,
Aaron

Well Aaron I don’t think its an either/or matter. Of course works flow forth from genuine faith– I like to put it this way– faith works (not faith vs. works). But the verse you are citing has to do with conversion, not final justification, and final justification can certainly be affected by apostasy, at a minimum. Paul is perfectly clear that we must account for our works to Jesus at the final judgment. It is an important theological distinction to say that while you are not saved by your works, you are also not finally saved or justified without them when there is time and opportunity to do them.
Blessings
BW3

Dr. Witherington,
Thank you once again for your insight to these matters.
In Christ,
Aaron

Doc, you and your Jesus and Money beliefs are stomping all over my me-ist free will. I think I’ll dial up the ACLU and complain.

“John Wesley once reminded us that when we spend money on egregious luxury items we are stealing food from the mouths of the poor and clothes from the needy.”
But Wesley lived prior to the impact of the Industrial Revolution. Throughout history wealth was perceived as zero-sum game … my wealth is at someone else’s expense. That simply isn’t so. In market exchange economies, where there is a semblance of justice, the preponderance of exchanges are win-win exchanges where both parties get something of more value than they are surrendering. Wealth is something that is constantly being created. Because I created wealth does not mean someone else was made to do without.
Most of the worlds poverty today is a result of unjust structures that inhibit the productive capacities of people to generate wealth and their freedom to exchange what they produce. The challenge is how to address the evils that create these barriers.
There certainly is a need for relief for people who are in crisis. There are also some who will need assistance throughout their lives for a variety of reasons. But continuous relief for the poor without making economic transformation the focal point robs people of dignity and reduces them to so many cattle to fed and sheltered.
Ceasing the purchase of luxury goods … while likely very good for our spiritual formation … does nothing in itself to aid the poor. Giving relief is necessary and helpful in many circumstances and destructive in many others. Economic transformation, where the poor become participants in the market with something of value to exchange is the focal point. I agree with Ron Sider when he says he believes in capitalism … so much so that he thinks everyone should have some capital.

You are missing the point Michael. If I spend this money on X, then I have not spent it on y. And if Y has a urgent need, then I have chosen to spend money on a luxury to the neglect of the need of my fellow human beings. Wealth may not be a zero sum game, but my resources are definitely finite and so I have to make appropriate choices. I agree that aide to the poor should help them back into supporting themselves, but what about the mentally ill poor, the disabled poor etc. who cannot support themselves? And actually Wesley dealt with the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Among other things he dealt with slave labor!
BW3

Let me elaborate considerably (at length).
You wrote on page 46:
“… In biblical culture there was both low productivity and no notable means of increasing productivity over time. … Given these realities, ancient peoples tended to believe that the goods of life had been distributed, even distributed by God, and they could not be increased – they were decidedly “limited.” This in turn meant that if a person wanted something hear she did not have, they had to barter for it (or steal it). It was not a matter of finding some way to make “more,” in order to increase one’s income and spending power.”
What changed from the eighteenth century forward? Three things:
Division of labor – jobs were divided into evermore specialized tasks, increasing the productivity of each worker. This meant lessened wages because each task required less skill but over time product cost dropped even faster making goods relatively more affordable. Eventually specialized jobs did require more skill driving up wages again
Technology – Combustion engines powering factories, and later creating a transportation revolution, exponentially increased the output per worker radically dropping the cost of goods relative to wages, thus improving the buying power of the populace. Later innovations in electricity, communications, and so on, only advanced these changes.
Trade – While it wasn’t until the last half of the twentieth century before trade become free in the modern sense, there was generally a progression toward freer trade.
What made all this possible was people creating wealth and pooling it together to invest (not spend on themselves or give away) in the assets (machines, factories, buildings and such) that generated these goods.
There are two ways people improve their economic condition. One is to get increased income relative to their cost of living. The other is to have a reduction in the cost of living relative to their income. That is why I’m perplexed by statements like:
“It has led to the lust for ever-cheaper goods, even at the expense of home-grown mom and pop companies that are forced out of business because most everything has to be outsourced so we can enjoy low prices.”
I’d invite you to take a look at an article by Jason Furman (Obama’s Deputy Director of the Economic Council) in Slate in 2006, Is Wal-Mart Good for the American Working Class?. In it he writes:
“A range of studies has found that Wal-Mart’s prices are 8 percent to 39 percent below the prices of its competitors. The single most careful economic study, co-authored by the well-respected MIT economist Jerry Hausman, found that grocery sales by Wal-Mart and other big-box stores made consumers better off to the tune of 25 percent of food consumption. That doesn’t mean much for those of us in the top fifth of the income distribution—we spend only about 3.5 percent of our income on food at home and, at least in my case, most of that shopping is done at high-priced supermarkets like Whole Foods. But that’s a huge savings for households in the bottom quintile, which, on average, spend 26 percent of their income on food. In fact, it is equivalent to a 6.5 percent boost in household income—unless the family lives in New York City or one of the other places that have successfully kept Wal-Mart and its ilk away.
Where do these low prices come from? Paul Krugman, writing back in 1993, provides an answer: “The most significant American business success story of the late 20th century may well be Wal-Mart, which has applied extensive computerization and a home-grown version of Japan’s ‘just in time’ inventory methods to revolutionize retailing.” Many economists didn’t expect the service sector to contribute much to productivity. Many non-economists still have a hard time believing it has. But Harvard economist Ken Rogoff has the numbers, and they are mind boggling:
‘[T]ogether with a few sister “big box” stores (Target, Best Buy, and Home Depot), Wal-Mart accounts for roughly 50% of America’s much vaunted productivity growth edge over Europe during the last decade. Fifty percent! Similar advances in wholesaling supply chains account for another 25%! The notion that Americans have gotten better at everything while other rich countries have stood still is thus wildly misleading. The US productivity miracle and the emergence of Wal-Mart-style retailing are virtually synonymous.’”
Now Furman is not saying everything Walmart is wonderful, nor am I am giving an unqualified endorsement, but I cannot comprehend why ever lower prices in the basic staples of life (food, clothes, toiletries, etc.), which so disproportionately aid the poor, should generate such animus.
Giving to the poor = Good
Reducing the cost of living for the poor = Bad
Further, … yes … there are unjust production facilities … even using slavery … at locations around the world. In some locales it is especially difficult to monitor and assess what is happening with production. But to suggest that this is the predominant situation is simply false. Most multinational corporations pay indigenous workers at or above … sometimes well above … what they could make elsewhere in their country, though it is often much less than what workers in developed nations would earn. The presence of such business often develops talent locally and technology indirectly transfers into the local economy. The globalization of this production and trade adds income to the poor that they would otherwise not have and spurs a cycle of upward prosperity.
What I’m hearing is that economic justice is about denying the poor in other nations jobs and keeping the cost of goods high in America so we can protect our nostalgic and aesthetic attachments to the “Mom and Pop” store.
Economist Brad Delong computes worldwide per capita GDP over the millennia using normalized 1990 US dollars. He estimates that it took from 10,000 BCE to 1750 CE for per capita GDP to rise from $90 to $180. From 1750 to 2000 … a period during which the world population grew six times from 1 bil to 6.6 bil … the per capita GDP went from $180 to $6,600! (More here) The number of people living on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day dropped from 39% in 1970 to the 15-20% range today … this during a time when the world population doubled. Meanwhile, global life expectancy rates at birth over the past century have risen from the historical norm of thirty years to nearly seventy years. While aid and generosity have played important roles in these transformations they have not been the central player. The central driver has been the productivity engine created by division of labor, technological innovation, and trade..
So coming back to the quote on page 46, in the ancient world … including the Bible … “there was both low productivity and no notable means of increasing productivity over time.” Thus, biblical and early church reflection is confined exclusively to matters of consumption, compensation, honesty, and generosity. Production capacity was an immutable reality.
The world has changed. We now know ways to radically increase productivity and create wealth. It involves amassing capital and managing it toward ever more productive ends. Yet Chapter Nine addresses stewardship from a pre-industrial worldview where consumption and generosity are the only components. Where does investment come in?
I know a guy who owns and operates multiple Subway delis. He employs several people and provides a valued service to the community. In order to accomplish this had to not only be frugal, he also had to not be “generous” … at least to the tune of the amount it took him to open up and run these stores … and he is making more money off these investments. Should this man not have opened these stores and instead have given his wealth away …. never creating the jobs or providing the services he does?
Not all of us will own and manage stores but we can invest in ventures or buy stocks and mutual funds. We can make money available for productive use by placing it on loan at the bank or other institution. This contributes to the productive capacities of society.
I’m reading exhortations to live more simply. I’m reading exhortations to be generous toward the poor. I’m on board with both. But I don’t not hear an exhortation to invest resources toward economic productivity as a part of our stewardship … the very thing that has been so transformative for humanity over the past many decades. Everything is about how to be guarded against the marketplace … not how to positively engage it.
In their book “Good Intentions” Charles North and Bob Smietana discuss research done by Laura Nash:
“In interviewing businesspeople for her book Church on Sunday, Work on Monday, Nash discovered a chasm between how businesspeople and their pastors saw economics. Pastors and church leaders talked in restrictive terms about the need to limit greed. The businesspeople in their congregations had a different view.
‘Business people took a positive, additive view: faith was about expanding economic opportunity for more people through business success,” says Nash. “For the business person, business was about solving problems and creating prosperity and it centered on specific activities.” (37-39)
While I deeply appreciated the biblical analysis in your book … and I resonate with much of what you have written here … this discounting of economic productivity is disappointing to me. Just as science has learned that the earth is not the center of the universe and we have made appropriate theological adjustments, we also have we learned that we can radically influence economic production for the better. The question I want to know is how do we theologically harness and shape this knowledge that has done so much good but was absent from the biblical context? How do we equip and send people into the world to employ this knowledge for the Kingdom? How am I to balance consumption, against investment, against generosity? Unfortunately, theologians overwhelmingly seem only to see an evil in the marketplace to be restrained not good to be channeled.
Exhortations to just live more simply and give more is incomplete and inadequate for many who are called to be in the marketplace.

Dr. Witherington,
How does what you directed us to in these passages square with the biblical assertion that perfect love casts out fear. I bring this up, because though I certainly agree that we are all accountable to Jesus, and will have to give an account of our lives, I also realize that if my motive for moral behavior is simply fear of punishment than I have not fully entered into the quality of life that Jesus died, resurrected, and ascended to freely share with me.
It seems to me that if a Christian is consumed by materialism than they really don’t understand the bondage that materialism is. Moreover, they don’t really get the riches God has given them in Jesus, a riches that is grounded upon the secure sonship of Jesus, which he graciously shares with us, and which enables us to find the only true contentment that our hearts can have.
I guess I am reacting to an implicit turn or burn sentiment present in your post, and though I think it is better to fear God, than be so dark of heart that there is no fear, I also realize that love is what really matters in the Kingdom, a kind of love that emerges from seeing the beauty of God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ, who made himself nothing so that we could receive everything that really matters.