Are all rich people automatically damned to hell because of their status?

  • Thread starter Thread starter YerBoii21
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Y

YerBoii21

Guest
I have read in the Bible the story of the wealthy man who refused to give away all his possessions to follow Jesus. Does this mean if we don’t give up everything we own we go to hell?
 
No, Jesus challenged the man to a higher calling yet, to perfection, even though the man was already on the right path for eternal life. And while God would have us all perfect, few of us will necessarily achieve it in this life, and then we have purgatory for that final perfecting.
 
He said “How difficult it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom”

Didn’t say impossible.
 
Last edited:
Wealth itself is not the problem. St. Paul wrote that evils arise from the love of money.
 
YerBoii21 said:
I have read in the Bible the story of the wealthy man who refused to give away all his possessions to follow Jesus. Does this mean if we don’t give up everything we own we go to hell?
Click to expand...
Of course not. That was one person, with his own particular circumstances.
 
YerBoii21 said:
Are all rich people automatically damned to hell because of their status?
Click to expand...
No. All people who put money before God’s will are dammed, which is true for pretty much everything, not just money.

Everybody has the error of sin, but those who place their own self-indulgence above the act of love, cannot have eternal love because their actions and the intention of their hearts is contrary to the very nature of love.
 
Last edited:
Exactly, and he went on to basically say that it’s impossible for all of us, but not impossible for God.
 
Last edited:
You cannot serve two masters. It is not about having possessions or being rich. It is about serving God or serving worldly possessions
 
YerBoii21 said:
I have read in the Bible the story of the wealthy man who refused to give away all his possessions to follow Jesus. Does this mean if we don’t give up everything we own we go to hell?
Click to expand...
All of the gifts we have exist in order to serve God and our neighbor. To increase love and to make the world better. Our gifts don’t belong to us so if we misuse what God gives us, we are responsible for our actions.

So God is going to want to know what a person did with His money.
 
Last edited:
We run the risk of reducing this question to a mathematical equation. What is rich? What if I am 50 cents over the line?
 
YerBoii21 said:
Does this mean if we don’t give up everything we own we go to hell?
Click to expand...
Giving up your wealth must be taken contextually.

Not all of us are called to radical poverty.

Being wealthy in and of itself is not a mortal sin that that would lead a soul to hell. The question is what you do with all the wealth?

If your stubbornly refuse to share your belongings with others out of greed, then you are not following Jesus, and yes if you continue in that path, you will go to hell.

But if you’re rich but you have a large family to feed, you need possessions. God might have also given you the means so that you may finance monasteries and other charitable activities of the church.
 
King Louis IX of France is a canonized saint. He did not become poor, but used his wealth wisely.
 
The the problem with wealth is that it requires deliberate respect for the power that is brings. That can be morally challenging even with the best intentions. The ultra rich of the world are in many ways not well suited for this. Just because one is good at business, for example, does not make one good at Philanthropy; a whole different skill set.

Wealth requires increased humility, sometimes beyond that of the holder. This is where the needle comes in.

I recently heard an excellent discussion regarding the pitfalls of our modern views of wealth, ownership, and its consequences. Basically that something is mine and I can establish specific ownership of it. People have often tried to counter this with some sort of Utopian society, but this inevitably fails at some point.

There’s the idea in the software world called Open Source. The basic idea is that you may use someone’s work as a basis for yours so long as you make the work you did publicly available in the same way. This will never work in the real world? Quite the opposite, a huge portion of the electronics and electronic services you use are based on such software. You’ll see documentation of this in any user guides you might get.

In many ways it’s like this, there are no real patents. What you “own” is the service you provide or the application you made of it. But in the process you have to share your knowledge or, conceptually, share the tools of production.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top