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vsedriver
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can you define ‘obscene wealth’?
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whatistrue
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If the reason actually was to make a point relative to how the person thought about possessions (as I suggested as a possibility), then no, it wouldn’t be a private teaching. And the teaching wouldn’t be as you have interpreted it. So where are those other verses that explicitly say that all the rich must do the same?
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TULIPed
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Got it. Practically speaking, anyone who’s rich (which is all of us - hint, hint), should immediately give all they have and live in abject poverty.
I wonder if all the rich people in the Bible did that? What about the whole cutting out eyes and ears thing? Do we have to do that too? Hating our parents? Do I have to hate my mom? (Did Jesus hate his mom?)
(As a Calvinist, it’s few and far between that I’m on this side of the argument by the way…)
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LilyM
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“One” earns money for many reasons. Some do accumulate far far more than they or their dependants could ever possibly use ior need n this world. And give only a scant fraction of that exccess to help others while wasting far more than they give on property, expensive cars, clothes and jewellery, drugs and alcohol and so on.LilyM:
One earns money to be able to support oneself and family, as well as to give regularly to charity. A prudent person would also set aside an amount to be saved and invested regularly in order to provide for future exigencies. It is a slow, steady, process. Spending money on luxuries, even small unnecessary luxuries, can ruin the process.
To quote a maxim from financial advisors:
There are only two sources of income: people working, and money working.
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vsedriver
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people build expensive cars
people make and design expensive clothes
People make and design jewelry
All of these provide jobs that support hundreds or thousands of people.
Art and music are all supported by the rich. How many of you have bought original art?
And ‘Rich’ is a relative term.
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LilyM
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Yep, all thoae cocaine dealers need a job! And all those poor car designers can’t possibly make a living from a car that sells for less than $250KLilyM:
people build expensive cars
people make and design expensive clothes
People make and design jewelry
All of these provide jobs that support hundreds or thousands of people.
Art and music are all supported by the rich. How many of you have bought original art?
And ‘Rich’ is a relative term.
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TMC
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As I said, that is a reasonable interpretation, but its is an interpretation, and not a mandated one. That meaning is not found in the text. I think the meaning is broader than that. Among other reasons, if the rich man were to help all the Lazaruses in his life, he would not be rich anymore. Which is the point, in my view. But that is also only an interpretation. The text merely says that he is tormented because he had so many good things in life.
Also a reasonable interpretation. Also not found in the text. The text says that when a man who followed all the commandments asked Jesus what he should do, Jesus told him to sell all his goods. Jesus didn’t say to stop being attached to his goods, or to sell his goods because the attachment was unhealthy. He simply told him to sell all his goods.
As a practical matter, I think it is hard to become very wealthy, or to stay very wealthy, without being attached to your goods and your wealth. I know some very wealthy people. They worked really hard to get rich. They are very attached to their wealth. They work hard to stay rich. They could easily give away the vast majority of their wealth and still have a very nice life. I am not saying they are terrible people. I am not predicting that they are going to Hell. But I am saying that Jesus’ clear teaching is that they should give their goods away. That is what He taught. It is much more clear than most of the teachings that we ascribe to Jesus, and we have to work very hard to deny that teaching.
For my part, I am pretty sure I have more money and more goods than Jesus would approve of. Am I “rich?” - that is a hard term to define. Its an issue I struggle with. But I am not going to salve my conscience by pretending Jesus was just fine with people being rich. He was not. We ignore all of His teachings at our peril - but this was a core teaching, repeated over and over in different ways. Modern Catholics, myself included, try hard to convince themselves this teaching doesn’t apply to them. It does. We should admit it, stop trying to rationalize our wealth, and instead think about how to do better.
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vsedriver
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I deliberately left the drugs out of it.Yep, all thoae cocaine dealers need a job! And all those poor car designers can’t possibly make a living from a car that sells for less than $250K
and it’s not just the designers is all the people who do the custom work. Of course they could go back to digging ditches…
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whatistrue
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Yeah, let’s make that guy that carves wood so well and can easily get $1000.00 for a piece that took him 2 full days to make go to work at $15.00 an hour doing production work in a factory because rich people shouldn’t exist.
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Magnanimity
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Very well said. I sympathize deeply with your misgivings here. It takes almost heroic defiance to downplay the NT teachings against acquisitiveness and the building up of one’s wealth (whether Christ, St Paul or St James, the message is consistent and clear). And then there’s the matter that the original church of the book of Acts was pretty much communal (communist)… It would be a separate question to ask whether that early church practice was to be normative for succeeding generations.
But, in any case, we have gotten far too comfortable with building our own wealth and giving as little as possible to the poor. We’re also comfortable with the existence of hundreds of billionaires, which is a perfect case-in-point of what popes for the last 130 years have been arguing against–“One of the greatest injustices in the contemporary world consists precisely in this: that the ones who possess much are relatively few and those who possess almost nothing are many. It is the injustice of the poor distribution of the goods and services originally intended for all,” JP2.
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ProdglArchitect
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They were not communist. Communism takes by force, it denies the rights of individual. They were communal, they willingly gave their goods to the Church for distribution. There is a world of difference between the two.
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LilyM
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Because of course those are the only two optionsvsedriver:
Yeah, let’s make that guy that carves wood so well and can easily get $1000.00 for a piece that took him 2 full days to make go to work at $15.00 an hour doing production work in a factory because rich people shouldn’t exist.
false dichotomy.
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whatistrue
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If someone is skilled at carving beautiful figures that take so long to make that no one can afford them except the rich, would you force the artist to do anything other than what he/she does best because the rich shouldn’t be? Maybe there are other choices besides factory work or manual labor, but the idea of destroying the market for such items because no one should be rich does unfairly restrict the artist’s ability to do what they love and do best.
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LilyM
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Lots of great artists don’t make a dime. Van Gogh sold only one painting in his life.LilyM:
If someone is skilled at carving beautiful figures that take so long to make that no one can afford them except the rich, would you force the artist to do anything other than what he/she does best because the rich shouldn’t be? Maybe there are other choices besides factory work or manual labor, but the idea of destroying the market for such items because no one should be rich does unfairly restrict the artist’s ability to do what they love and do best.
Compare and contrast with Damian Hurst- dude sticks a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde, gets paid a mint.
Art, and its value, and greatness for that matter, are highly subjective.
As a modestly earning art lover I could.not afford your artist’s $1,000 carving. But I do my bit to support galleries that can and do. Or art schools. Or local.churches that commission art works.
Its not all about big $$$$
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JimG
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The existence of billionairres doesn’t bother me. They didn’t steal their billions from me. And whether they live lavishly or poorly, their wealth benefits others. It gets spent. or invested, or put into endowments. Even if they spend it wastefully, someone is making a profit from their spending. If they are investing, other businesses are growing because of it.
If an author writes a popular book which sells well, should the publisher say to them, this book is too popular, you are making too much in royalties. After the first million, we’re cutting you off. In a socialist society that might happen, but then all the high earners would move to a less confiscatory country.
If an author writes a popular book which sells well, should the publisher say to them, this book is too popular, you are making too much in royalties. After the first million, we’re cutting you off. In a socialist society that might happen, but then all the high earners would move to a less confiscatory country.
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Magnanimity
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I said “communal.” I put “communist” in parentheses to emphasize the extreme communal nature of the original church. And it was extreme in its sharing of all things in common. There’s no getting around that.
But this says nothing of the fact that the church has consistently for over a century spoken out against the gross injustices of both communism and capitalism. They’re each wonderful pie in the sky theories. In practice, they end up in gross inequities and oppression. Government inesquity/oppression in the one, corporate inequity/oppression in the other. But don’t take my word for it. Read the lengthy encyclical quotes I gave above. Distributism is not a dirty word. It’s the teaching of the church.
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Magnanimity
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They have their billions by not advocating for more distributions of their shares in their respective companies. And such gross examples of inequality have been bothering our holy fathers since 1890. Stands to reason it might need to start bothering us too.
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ProdglArchitect
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Communism isn’t communal, it robbery through force. I’m in favor of communal living, but communism is evil.
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TMC
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They don’t love helping others enough to give away all their money, or they would not be rich. They may love others enough to give them some of their money, that is certainly true. And that is laudable, as far as it goes. But to stay rich, they must want to hold on to that money more than they want to give it away. I am not judging, its just math. (The same is true of me, or anyone, obviously. I also must want to hold on to what I have more than I want to help others, or I would give what I have away.)
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