Recently started a book I've been sitting on for a while, Richard Horsley's You Shall Not Bow Down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul. I think about the relationship between faith and wealth quite a bit and I'm always interested in deepening my understanding of that topic.

Something I like that Horsley makes explicit right from the outset is that the various texts of scripture are primarily concerned with concrete socio-economic realities. It is our post enlightenment assumptions that have largely stripped our readings of scripture of that important context. Specifically, he notes that the socio-economic realities of the societies from which scripture emerged were divided between a "vast majority of people who lived at subsistence level and a tiny minority of rulers who gained their wealth and power by expropriating a portion of the people's produce." Scripture's economic concern is rooted in that tension between the majority poor and the few wealthy who oppress them.

This is where things get sticky, I think, for many modern readers in our current, Western context. One of the ways that capitalism has tried to ease the conflict and division between the poor and the wealthy is through the concept of a middle class. Capitalism depends on this myth that anyone can move from poor to rich as long as they work hard enough. It keeps people's faith in upholding the economic system even when it's not fully serving them. The middle class falls into this strange not-quite-poor-but-also-not-considered rich grey area, which makes it tricky when reading the critiques of wealth or the solidarity with the poor in scripture.

The middle class (which is shrinking, I know) is, by comparison to the majority poor across the world, very wealthy. That wealth is also, perhaps indirectly, built off the exploitation of others. Yet, in comparison to the super wealthy, the middle class is closer to poverty. Many live paycheck-to-paycheck, in a dependency that can feel like being poor. The middle class is trapped just like the poor, but are benefitting off the flow of wealth in a way that makes them beholden to the system that traps them.

So how then does scripture read our context today? Something I am hoping to dig into more as I work through Horsley.