Epilogue: Jesus on Money and Usury

 

The purpose of this article is to solidify the conclusions from a previous article, here.  In it, I discussed the earthly basis of Jesus' parables on the talents and minas in Matthew and Luke.  The fundamental conclusion is that Jesus assumes the general goodness of usury in those parables.

However, you do see in other places of the Bible that usury, loaning and charging interest in repayment, can be immoral in certain situations.  Namely, you are not to charge interest as a way to oppress people.  Like any other technology it is a tool that can be used for benevolent or malevolent purposes.  

In the Bible, the clearest instruction against usury is that interest should not be charged when the recipient uses that money to provide for the basic needs of life like food, clothing, shelter, or even taxes.  I think this list could include any good or service, including cars and houses, that a person uses for personal consumption.  That list could sound extreme to you because of how widely usury is used today, but philosophically I think that is the correct conclusion.

In Jesus' parables, the nobleman did not give money to his servants to provide for their basic needs.  He was providing their needs at his expense and did not require them to pay him back.  This explanation is not explicitly stated in the parables, but it recognizes the way these types of relationships worked in the ancient world.  Following this understanding, in the parable, the nobleman is essentially playing the role of a banker himself, making business loans.  He loaned his money to the servants in order for them to engage in economic and entrepreneurial activity.  The goal was for them to make profit and thereby increase the wealth of the nobleman.

Under this kind of circumstance, charging interest is good and ethical.  It should be clear in the parable, that the nobleman is God and the servants are us.  How could God ever be portrayed as anything but good, holy, and loving?  Jesus would never represent God as a wicked person in a parable in order to teach what the Kingdom of God is like.  That simply doesn't make sense.  Additionally, the word for servant, doulos, is used throughout the New Testament to describe believers in Jesus.  God is the perfectly holy banker so to speak.  Then believers are entrusted by God to produce good deeds using the spiritual resources He gives.

When thinking about the response to the lazy servant, the nobleman's "better alternative" was for the servant to give the money to another man such as he who would find someone better to loan the money to.  The ultimate recipient of the money in that hypothetical example would do just as the good and faithful servants did.  The lazy slave would then receive a portion of the profit that the banker's loan would have produced.  The lazy slave wouldn't return as much money back to his lord, but at least it would be something.  The good servants returned a 100% profit to their lord in Matthew 25.  The lazy slave returned 0%, but giving it to a banker would have yielded something like 10% or 25% profit.

Thinking through usury in light of these parables, helps us understand the kind of mistakes Christians have made in the past.  The church and Christian kings outlawed usury for laypeople in the early medieval period, the 8th century roughly.  They were repealed gradually spanning the 16th through 19th centuries.

Prohibiting usury was a problem because loans are beneficial to people to facilitate economic activity.  Further, kings wanted access to loans for wars and public works.  Merchants wanted access to loans to fund new business ventures.  During the prohibitions, the only sources of loans were non-Christians, most commonly Jews living in the country.  This meant those in control of this powerful tool were a part of a religious and ethnic minority group.

It should be clear after reading through the original article and this epilogue that you want bankers to have high levels of virtue and love for people.  You want bankers to have the same values and interests as the people they are giving loans to.  Otherwise, you are setting up a situation where oppression or conflict is more likely to occur and where it will be harder to identify and punish corruption.  How do you produce godly bankers?  Biblical teaching and Christian discipline are probably the most important factors.  The banking industry could enact ethical requirements for potential lenders. It could enact further guidelines to protect borrowers.  The subject is tricky as regulations commonly have unintended negative consequences.  Let's never forget the market, which is a powerful tool for weeding out bad actors and rewarding those with proven character.  Bottom line, no system involving humans will be problem free.  There are no perfect solutions in this world.  However, we should not prohibit such a powerful tool due to the lack of a perfect solution, or to create a separate banking class in society.