Does the Bible promise that God wants you to become a millionaire? Or does it tell you that money is evil?  

Does it tell you that you will be rich if you tithe? Or does it tell you that being rich will keep you out of heaven?

Here is my answer to every one of these questions. 

“Every time you hear someone say, “The Bible says…” about a particular topic…it probably doesn’t.”

“Nothing—and I mean, nothing—causes more hurt and confusion than religion doled out in Bible verses. Too often, Bible verses become weapons to be used against people, to proclaim that women may not lead, husbands must rule, slaves must submit obediently to their masters, and gays have no place in the church.”

“You can find Bible verses that seem to proclaim these rules. But when these verses are put into their own contexts, the strident clarity of the Bible verses turns into something else. The verses become pieces of a larger whole. And very frequently, the Bible verse that is so confidently proclaimed as the very word of God turns out to be a distortion of the original intention behind the Bible verse.”

[This is an excerpt from my article, "Meet Your Enemy: The Bible Verse." You can read the whole article at  Impolite Topics ]

In my previous post, “What Is The Difference Between Rich Christians And Broke Christians?”  I made the claim that one of the most important reasons why rich Christians are rich and broke Christians are broke is that they use different Bible verses about money. 

Christians who claim that material prosperity is their God-promised right can quote chapter and verse of Bible verses to prove that God wants them to be rich. Christians who believe that they cannot have both God and money can easily quote a different set of Bible verses. 

Right now, televangelist Kenneth Copeland is the focus of considerable attention because he has gone on the offensive against federal requests for detailed financial information.

One of the tools that Copeland is using to rally public support is a website. His website frames the federal investigations into his personal and organizational finances—and the finances of other prosperity preachers—as an attack on religious freedom. 

“The site is in response to an inquiry led by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who last November sent letters to six prominent ministries asking that they provide financial records and answer questions regarding their organizational as well as personal finances. The senate probe was prompted by media reports and ministry watchdogs that alleged opulent spending and possible abuse of their nonprofit status.” Kenneth Copeland Takes Senate Probe Battle to Public

On the web site, there is a rather transparent and self-serving “Parable About Three Sermons On The Mount.” The entire point of the parable is that poor people would much rather hear that God wants them to be rich than poor. 

The reason this parable is so transparent and self-serving is that it simply reinforces the idea that the popularity of a message is equivalent to the validity of the message. Does anyone doubt that a message of prosperity is more popular than a message of self-sacrifice and poverty, especially if the message is addressed to people who are living in  poverty?

It is obvious that Copeland and other prosperity preachers amass both great crowds and great wealth as they quote Bible verses promising prosperity. However, pointing to the popularity of the message avoids the basic question: Is this promise of prosperity a Biblical message?

And so, I come back to Bible verses and my assertion that “Every time you hear someone say, ‘The Bible says…’ about a particular topic…it probably doesn’t.”

Most of the time, when someone quotes the Bible—for any purpose— you will hear carefully selected Bible verses, without any effort to place those Bible verses into any larger context.

The most basic point of Going Broke With Jesus is that “a text without a context is a pretext.”  In my book, I have demonstrated how Bible verses about money often turn into something far different from what the words meant in the original stories.

Bible verses about money become pretexts without context when:

• A Bible verse is separated from the context of the whole story in the Bible book.
• A Bible book is separated from the context of the society in which the book was written.
• Bible verses are quoted without paying attention to the contexts of our own economic and religious system.

When Bible verses are used without context, they become pretexts—whether they are used by gazillionaire televangelists proclaiming that God wants you to be rich or broke preachers standing on street corners proclaiming that God condemns all material wealth, or anyone in between these two extremes.
 
For a description of how slick televangelists can quote out-of-context Bible verses as part of a powerful sales process, read Televangelists Snicker All the Way to The Bank, by Marsha West.

“‘He went through several Bible references where stones ‘talked’ in the Old Testament. Here Avanzini introduces the stone idea. He strolled down the aisles, his ring winking in the lights, and held out a shiny stone for a woman to hold. Avanzini told the assembled crowd of about 650 people that these stones should be rubbed whenever people faced rising prices or higher prices at the pump. The ushers went down the aisles with buckets of shiny, smooth stones and handed them out.’”

“As I mentioned above, Avanzini uses psychological tactics on Christians who come to hear him speak. As soon as he had the Harvest Church audience in the palm of his hand, he conveyed his real message. Incredibly, he takes Bible stories out of context and misapplies the intended meaning to get people to buy what he’s selling.” Televangelists Snicker All the Way to The Bank.

From my observations, there is nothing incredible about taking Bible stories out of context and misapplying the intended meaning, to make them mean whatever someone wants them to mean. The televangelists use out-of-context Bible verses as pretexts to promise massive wealth to their followers. In the process, the televangelists also amass great fortunes for themselves.

Regrettably, this is what happens frequently when people quote the Bible. The Bible verses become tools for something that misses or distorts the original intention of the words in their actual Biblical contexts. This is why so many Bible verses about money become pretexts for something other than the original intention. The only solution for any misuse of Bible verses about money is to put these verses into larger contexts.  

This is the solution I have used in Going Broke With Jesus, as I have taken 8 sayings of Jesus about money and put them into the larger context of Jesus’ heroic battle against religious and financial abuse in his society.

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson

While some Christians read their Bibles and believe that God wants them to be poor, other Christians read the same Bible and determine that God wants them to be rich.  

A prime example of a rich Christian is Kenneth Copeland, a televangelist who has built a religious empire teaching prosperity.

“Copeland, 71, is a pioneer of the prosperity gospel, which holds that believers are destined to flourish spiritually, physically and financially - and share the wealth with others.

“His ministry’s 1,500-acre campus, behind an iron gate a half-hour drive from Fort Worth, is testament to his success. It includes a church, a private airstrip, a hangar for the ministry’s $17.5 million jet and other aircraft, and a $6 million church-owned lakefront mansion.

“Already a well-known figure, Copeland has come under greater scrutiny in recent months. He is one target of a Senate Finance Committee investigation into allegations of questionable spending and lax financial accountability at six large televangelist organizations that preach health-and-wealth theology.

“All have denied wrongdoing. But Copeland has fought back the hardest, refusing to answer most questions from the inquiry’s architect, Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa.

“Copeland’s church also has invited an Internal Revenue Service audit, which would keep information private, and has launched a sophisticated Web site, Believers Stand United, to “help set the record straight.” Kenneth Copeland

In this article, my only intention is to demonstrate that Kenneth Copeland uses the same Bible to be rich that other Christians use to be poor. The critical difference between rich Christians and poor Christians is not the Bible, but the Bible verses they use.

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson

Christian debt relief has become a significant topic in Christian churches as more and more Christians struggle with debt, foreclosure, and bad credit. How does Christian debt relate to Christian teachings about tithing and prosperity?

Money As Rotten Fish

The first answer is that the relationship is complicated. Money is such a complex topic in Christian history. Every church needs money to operate and expects its members to contribute money to pay the bills, pay salaries, and do various charitable good works. At the same time, many churches treat money as if it is rotten fish. Smelly, dirty, and best kept far, far away from sensitive noses. It’s unfair to stereotype churches to cartoon versions of themselves. At the same time, there are conflicting tendencies within churches that lead to dramatically different approaches to money.

Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, said the problem for some church members is that “Christianity has always had a complicated relationship with money.”

On the one hand, Wolfe said, believers are told that the love of money is the root of all evil. Then there are those who preach a prosperity gospel, which promotes that God wants believers to have an abundant life with extraordinary financial blessings.
Alan Wolfe

And so churches with the idea that “money is rotten fish but we can’t live without it,” operate with a double standard. Money is bad when you have it and spend it on yourself, but money becomes good when you give it to the church, and let the church do God’s work with it.

Tithing

Tithing is the practice of giving ten percent of your income to the church. Some churches insist that tithing is commanded by God in the Bible. Other churches never mention the idea of tithing, but instead ask people to pledge a certain amount of money during annual stewardship campaigns.

Not surprisingly, the churches that teach tithing as a requirement tend to be churches with more income than churches that treat offerings as a matter of personal convenience.

As a matter of logic, it would seem that the best way for the church to get more money to pay its bills and do what it perceives as its mission is to help people create more wealth so that they will have more to contribute to the church.

If you are going to tell people to tithe, it would be better for the church to get a tenth of $1000 than a tenth of $100, and it would be even better to get a tithe of $100,000 or $1,000,000. The higher the income level within the church, the more money the church would take in from its tithing members.

But logic doesn’t always apply. Money is so highly charged, and laden with so much theological baggage, that churches tend to teach mixed messages about money.

And so it is a strange juxtaposition. You will hear sermons about the evils of having money and sermons about the blessings of giving money. It’s the same money, but when you have it, money is evil. When you give it to the church to God’s work, money now becomes good.

The Missing Piece About Wealth Creation

This is why you will often hear sermons about giving and tithing, but not very many about how to manage your own money to create wealth.

“What we are trying to get over to people is that we have to teach about stewardship the same way we teach about forgiveness,” said the Rev. Kerry A. Hill, president of the Collective Banking Group, a consortium of pastors in Prince George’s and the District who help area churches finance projects. “A lot of pastors agree that we have talked about tithing, and we need to talk about the other 90 percent.”
Kerry A. Hill 

Prosperity Gospel 

Obviously, there are many exceptions. Prosperity gospel churches will tell you it is good for you to have money. The prosperity gospel message goes on to teach that one way to ensure that God blesses you with more and more money is for you to give more and more to the church. Prosperity churches often teach financial literacy to their members and take away the stigma of wanting and having money.

So, on the one hand, you have churches teaching you that money is bad stuff until you give it us, and churches that teach that money is a sign of God’s blessing. The more money you have, the more obviously God has blessed you.

The Rock And Hard Place Of Christian Debt

Between these two extremes, there is the middle ground where most Christians live. And these days, that place is between a rock and a hard place, in an economy that is making many people struggle for money while others grow richer. The rock is rising costs without higher wages, and the hard place is rising debt and tighter credit.

Historically, many Christian churches have helped people in trouble, but most have not taught people how to handle debt. This is changing, as churches are beginning to teach people how to deal with money. And for many Christians, that means learning how to deal with debt.

The article, “Calling On Gospel To Call Off Debt,” provides glimpses of what some churches are doing to help their members deal with debt.

Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson

The teachings of Jesus about money are always mixed up with political power. Of all the sayings of Jesus, the words, “Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” (Matthew 22:15-22; Luke 20: 19-26) demonstrate clearly that money is always more than a matter of personal morality.

This is a story about taxation and authority. It gets to the heart of the matter about the relationship of religion and government. It raises the question: Do believers obey God or the government?

This episode shows that Jesus was a watched man. Throughout the gospel narratives, Jesus had several groups of people from the ruling class who followed him around, listening and looking carefully for anything they could use to turn him over to the Roman authorities. The focus of the trap concerns paying taxes to the emperor.

From the time of the Roman conquest of Palestine in 6 C.E., Rome demanded and collected direct taxes from the people. Government officials collected land taxes, a “poll” on each person, taxes on personal property, and taxes on the transport of goods. The question to Jesus concerns the payment of the poll tax.

The occupied people of Palestine hated paying taxes to their Roman occupiers. The people considered themselves oppressed people under military occupation. From time to time, various messianic and revolutionary groups formed in opposition to the Roman occupiers and the Jewish collaborators. Occasionally, an open rebellion broke out and was quickly crushed by the ruling powers.

These revolutionary groups regarded any collaboration with the hated Roman occupiers as treason to God. Refusal to pay the Roman taxes was an act of defiance against the oppressors and an act of allegiance to God.

When these various collaborators with Rome ask Jesus about paying the temple tax, they are looking for evidence that he is one of the revolutionaries, so that they can hand him over to the authority of Pontius Pilate, the chief Roman authority.

During the time of Jesus, several types of coins were commonly used. The Romans minted their own silver coins in Rome and other imperial mints. One of these Roman coins was the denarius, which was the accepted daily wage for a common laborer. The Roman coins had an image of the emperor on the front side of the coin. The coin handed to Jesus was probably the silver denarius bearing the image of Caesar Augustus.

By asking whose image and inscription are on the coin, Jesus successfully avoids the trap. When his questioners identify Caesar, Jesus says, “Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.” In other words, he says, “Pay the tax.” He is not openly advocating civil disobedience against the Roman authorities on the matter of taxation-a stance which would have given the Romans immediate cause to arrest him.

Although Jesus avoided the trap in the story, Christian history has used these words to draw a line between church and state. The most notable is Martin Luther’s theology of the two kingdoms. The church would administer the spiritual realm, while worldly governments would rule the secular realm. Although Luther’s theology was more complicated than this, it led to the idea that believers owed allegiance and obedience to the worldly ruler on matters concerning government.

In a situation with many similarities to the Jewish Revolt against Rome, which began in 66 C.E., the German peasants rebelled in the Peasants’ War, 1524-26. They thought that Luther’s stance supported their cause. However, in one of the most controversial decisions of his life, Luther invoked the “Two Kingdoms theology” to condemn the revolt, based on the idea that the political leadership was ordained by God to rule on Earth. The revolt failed, and reinforced the long-standing belief that human beings owe allegiance on Earth to their human rulers.

During the Nazi era, most Christian churches in Germany maintained this separation between church and state. The church ruled on spiritual matters. The government ruled on secular matters. Only a few churches, known as the Confessing Church, defied Hitler’s claim to power, with predictable results. Many died for opposing the power of the government.

The words of Jesus managed to get him off the hook in the story. However, the legacy of these words, “Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar,” leads to complex and difficult questions about the power of governments and the allegiance of believers. What the Bible says about money is never simply a matter of quoting the teachings of Jesus without understanding the larger political context of the story.

Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D. What if most of what you believe about the teachings of Jesus about money is not true? Don’t let Bible study lessons based on mistranslations and biblical urban legends fill you with guilt and confusion about what the Bible says about money. I have written a book about 8 sayings of Jesus, Going Broke With Jesus:How Heroic Stories Intended To Liberate The Poor Become Biblical Urban Legends About The Evils Of Money to show how often Christian teaching misunderstands the true intentions of the teachings of Jesus about money. Get your copy at www.GoingBrokeWithJesus.com.

What the Bible says about the poor widow in the temple is often used as a model of sacrificial Christian giving.

This is what I learned in Sunday School. When I went to Sunday School, the major topic of many of our opening exercises was raising money for the poor. We made little church-shaped cardboard boxes to hold our nickels and dimes so that we could help buy chickens or a cow for people in some poor village somewhere. Every Thanksgiving, we were supposed to collect food for the poor. And so we brought in cans of green beans and boxes of Jell-O to donate to the poor. We heard many times about the poor widow who gave everything she had to live on as an example of what God wanted us to do.

This kind of  interpretation of the Bible story about the poor widow is a drastic misinterpretation of the teachings of Jesus about money.

A widow in ancient Palestine was in a very vulnerable financial condition. Most people lived in patriarchal family units on hereditary family land, under the authority of the ruling adult male. Women lived under the authority and protection of men. Unmarried women remained at home under the authority of their fathers. Married women lived under the authority and protection of their husbands.

While some widows in Palestine were citizens of Rome, with greater legal and financial resources, most widows were extremely vulnerable. Most widows had no legal standing and no resources of their own. For this reason, the Torah always recognized widows as a special class of people who needed protection.

In both Mark 12:38-44 and Luke 20:45-47; 21:1-4, the story of the poor widow comes immediately after Jesus’s condemnation of the practices of the Scribes. The Scribes were the legal scholars. They were the experts on the oral and written Torah. In both Mark and Luke, Jesus comments on the poor widow after describing the Scribes as those who “devour the houses of widows.”

Unless she was a Roman citizen, a widow had no legal status to manage the property and money her husband had left behind. After a man’s death, the Scribes would appoint a pious man to handle the widow’s financial affairs. The implication of the story is that the Scribes were using their status as experts in the law to defraud the widows out of their property. The Scribes who were supposed to protect her had left her with only two tiny coins to live on.

This story Jesus tells about the poor widow is consistent with his condemnation of the religious system, which defrauded the poor widows. It is also consistent with his condemnation of the practices of the rich because of their exploitation of the poor. He compares the contributions of the rich with the tiny contribution of the widow as a way to criticize the rich. Although the very rich gave large sums of money, what they gave made no difference in the way they lived. They gave out of their abundance. However, she gave all she had to live on.

When Christian teaching separates the story of the widow from the comment about the Scribes who devour the houses of widows, it misses the point of the teachings of Jesus about money.

This is not a story telling the poor to give away everything they have. It is a story about an unjust system in which the poorest and most vulnerable were being exploited by the rich and powerful.

What Sunday School taught me about this story distorts the point of the original story and creates fear and lack in the ones Jesus intended to liberate.

The words about the poor widow need to be put back into the context of the whole story of Jesus in his campaign to proclaim the Kingdom of God for the benefit of the poorest and most vulnerable. This story does not teach the most vulnerable of the society to give away everything they have. In fact, this story is a condemnation of a religious system that robbed widows of their money.

Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D. What if most of what you believe about Jesus and money is not true? Don’t let Bible study lessons based on mistranslations and biblical urban legends fill you with guilt and confusion about money. I have written a book about 8 sayings of Jesus, Going Broke With Jesus:How Heroic Stories Intended To Liberate The Poor Become Biblical Urban Legends About The Evils Of Money to show how often Christian teaching misunderstands the true intentions of what Jesus said about money. Get your copy at www.GoingBrokeWithJesus.com.

Do the Beatitudes teach that Christian believers must be poor to get into Heaven?  One of the most common misunderstandings about what the Bible says about money is the idea that Jesus advocated poverty for believers, based on the words “blessed are the poor.”

The statement, “blessed are the poor,” occurs in the Beatitudes in both Matthew in “the Sermon on the Mount” and in Luke in “the Sermon on the Plain.” The statement by Jesus, “blessed are the poor,” is a much more radical statement than most of us have ever realized.

In the original Greek, both Matthew and Luke use the word “ptochos.” English Bibles translate the Greek word “ptochos” as “poor.” Greek has another word for “poor,” “penes.” Penes referred to people who had to work hard for a living, often struggling to make ends meet. In contrast, a “ptochos” was someone who was utterly destitute and cut off from all family and social ties. In other words, a “ptochos” was a beggar.

In the advanced agrarian society in which Jesus lived, the “penes” were the peasant farmers and artisans struggling to earn a living in an unjust and oppressive system. The “ptochos” were the degraded and expendable people living at the very lowest levels of the society. The “ptochos” were unwanted, displaced, and rejected.

Both Matthew and Luke use the word “ptochos” to claim that the Kingdom of God belongs to the beggars, the destitute, and the expendables.

As soon as the phrase, “blessed are the poor,” is disconnected from the vision of the Kingdom of God, it becomes a prime target for a makeover into the idea that Jesus was advocating poverty.

When I think back to my own Sunday school education about  Jesus and money, I am both amazed and appalled by how often we were told that Jesus taught that God wanted us to be poor. If being rich was going to keep us out of Heaven, being poor was our best guarantee to get in.

The biggest mistake my Sunday School made is the most typical Christian misunderstanding of the Beatitudes. It confused description with prescription. We didn’t understand that Jesus was describing his vision of life under the Kingdom of God. We thought that we had to be poor in order to be blessed. We missed that Jesus was saying that even the poorest of the poor would receive God’s blessing. That is the radical statement. We thought he was prescribing required behavior to get into Heaven. We thought God wanted us to be poor. In fact, Jesus was describing his vision of life on Earth without poverty.

Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D. What if most of what you believe about Jesus and money is not true? Don’t let Bible study lessons based on mistranslations and biblical urban legends fill you with guilt and confusion about money. I have written a book about 8 sayings of Jesus, Going Broke With Jesus:How Heroic Stories Intended To Liberate The Poor Become Biblical Urban Legends About The Evils Of Money to show how often Christian teaching misunderstands the true intentions of what Jesus said about money. Get your copy at www.GoingBrokeWithJesus.com.

Perhaps the most well-known words from the Bible are the “Lord’s Prayer.” Versions of the prayer occur in both the “The Sermon On The Mount” in Matthew 6:9-13 and “the Sermon on the Plain” in Luke 11:1-4. Although it is not immediately obvious to most people who pray this prayer, this prayer is deeply concerned with economic issues.

Even though every Christian church uses the Lord’s Prayer, following Matthew’s version rather than Luke’s, there are variations in the exact wording.

Some churches use the archaic English, “thy” and “thine.” Protestant churches usually end the prayer with the words, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.” Roman Catholics do not recite this ending.

The most critical vocabulary difference is whether a church refers to “debts,” “trespasses,” or “sins.”

Jesus was referring to real bread and real debts when he taught his followers to pray for daily bread and forgiveness of debts. He was not simply teaching a prayer about spiritual nurture and forgiveness of sins.

In his prayer, Jesus makes clear that his followers are to pray for real bread and forgiveness of financial debts. In Greek, the word for debt is a financial term. Jesus’ concern for bread and debts is consistent with his social and ethical approach to his society. He focused on the injustices of his society against the poor and dispossessed.

The most important belief expressed in the prayer is that the time will come when God will establish God’s rule on earth, in the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God does not refer to Heaven. It refers to God’s rule on earth, when God will end oppression, poverty, and suffering on earth. This is clear in the language, “Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

The economic foundation of the prayer is lost when the words “bread” and “debts” become spiritual metaphors with no connection to real food and economic debt

No one who heard Jesus speak would have limited his words about bread and debts to spiritual metaphors. Jesus spoke to a population who were underfed and overtaxed. Most of the peasants were in debt, because the king and the elite class owned the land. They claimed proprietary rights to the land and everything grown on it. The demands from the ruling class were so high that the peasants were deeply in debt. In addition, many of the beggars were people who had been forced off the land because they could not pay their debts to the ruling class.

Jesus condemned the society, which had created such a vast gap between the haves and the have-nots. He criticized the rich for exploiting and oppressing the poor. He also criticized the religious system for judging so many groups of people in the society to be “unclean” and unworthy of God’s blessing.

He saw firsthand the extent of hunger, poverty, sickness, and suffering endured by most of the population. He saw how the rich landowners grew rich at the expense of the poor. He saw people who were homeless because they had been driven off their land by high rents and taxes. He saw people living in poverty because the largest percentage of what they grew or made or caught was confiscated by taxes. He knew what it was to live under Roman occupation, where Roman soldiers could force people to do almost anything. He saw how the Temple system collaborated with the Roman occupiers to bleed the people of their money and their power.

It is also true that Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer preserves an Aramaic idiom. Aramaic writings show that the language of “debt” and “debtors” was used regularly for “sin” and “sinners.”  Jesus spoke Aramaic and clearly intended that the word “debts” in the prayer refer to both money debts and sins.

In Luke, the financial reality behind the metaphor is lost because Luke uses the word “sin” rather than “debt.” This obscures the underlying concern with real bread and real debts.

Especially in these times of food shortages and rampant debts, Christians who want to pray as Jesus intended need to restore the basic economic meaning to the prayer. This is especially significant at a time when basic staples such as wheat, rice, and corn have become more and more scarce. It is also significant for the millions of people who are swamped in debt and facing foreclosure and bankruptcy because of debts they cannot repay.

Jesus intended his words to refer to suffering and injustice in his own society. This prayer for bread and debts referred to real bread and forgiveness of real financial debts.

Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D. What if most of what you believe about Jesus and money is not true? Don’t let Bible study lessons based on mistranslations and biblical urban legends fill you with guilt and confusion about money. I have written a book about 8 sayings of Jesus, Going Broke With Jesus:How Heroic Stories Intended To Liberate The Poor Become Biblical Urban Legends About The Evils Of Money to show how often Christian teaching misunderstands the true intentions of what Jesus said about money. Get your copy at www.GoingBrokeWithJesus.com.

By Kalinda Rose Stevenson, PhD

Many Christians confidently point to their Bibles and claim that Ephesians 5:22 commands wives to submit to their husbands.

This idea is particularly relevant right now because of Mike Huckabee’s campaign for the Republican nomination for President.

In June 1998, The Southern Baptist Convention made an official statement to declare that “a wife is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.”

At that time, Mike Huckabee was the Governor of Arkansas. He was also a former Southern Baptist minister. Huckabee joined 129 other evangelical leaders to support this statement in a full page ad in USA Today.

Huckabee, who was not taken seriously as a possible presidential candidate at the beginning of his campaign, won the Iowa caucuses. This means that we are faced with the possibility that the Republican presidential nominee could be someone who insists that wives are to submit to their husbands.

Although religion and politics are officially separate, this religious idea that wives are to submit to their husbands raises important political questions about equality and the legal rights of women. When politicians make political statement based on the Bible, the claim that “a wife is to graciously submit to the servant leadership of her husband” is not simply a religious idea, but a deeply political one.

However anyone chooses to understand what “submission” and “servant leadership” might mean, the most basic problem with interpretation of this verse concerns translation of the original Greek into English.

Every English translation I have ever seen translates Ephesians 5:22 as a complete sentence, with an imperative verb addressed to women. Here are a few samples:

• “Wives, submit yourself to your own husbands as unto the Lord” (King James Version.)
• “Wives be subject to your husbands as to the Lord” (Modern Language Version.)
• “You wives must submit to your husbands’ leadership in the same way you submit to the Lord” (Living Bible.)
• “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord” (Revised Standard Version.)
• “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord” (New Revised Standard Version.)
• “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord”(New International Version.)

This is clear enough, isn’t it?  Whether it is “submit” or “be subject,” in English translations, Ephesians 5:22 is a separate sentence with an imperative verb. Many English Bibles also treat Ephesians 5:22 as the start of a new paragraph.

And this is exactly the problem. Ephesians was not written in English. Ephesians was written in Greek, sometime in the first century. When you consult the Greek version of Ephesians, you will notice something remarkable.  (Here is the Greek version in an interlinear form with English translations.)

Verse 5:22, in its entirety reads: “Wives to their own husbands as to the Lord.”
This isn’t even a complete sentence, because there is no verb.

So, where does the idea of submission come from?  It comes from the verb of the previous verse, Ephesians 5:21.

In 5:21, the verb is not an imperative addressed only to wives. Instead, it is what Greek grammar calls a “reflexive” verb, in which submission is “to one another other.”

Here are some translations of 5:21.

• “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God (King James Version.)
• Be submissive to one another out of reverence for Christ (Modern Language version.)
• Honor Christ by submitting to one another (Living Bible.)
• Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ (Revised Standard Version.)
• Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ (New Revised Standard.)
• Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ (New International Version.)

When it comes to Ephesians 5:21 and 5:22, we have two distinct translation decisions at work in most English Bibles:

The first is that English translations take the idea of submission  from the verb in 5:21 and create an imperative form of the verb in 5:22, which has no verb.
The second is that English translations tend to treat 5:21 and 5:22 as separate units, with no real connection to each other.

The separation of 5:21 and 5:22 into separate units demonstrates the sometimes misleading consequences of dividing Biblical books into chapters and verses.

In the earliest Greek manuscripts, there were no spaces between words and no punctuation at all. This means that there were no separate sentences and paragraphs.

All of the punctuation, and the division in sentences, verses, and chapters were added over time. Sometimes, the divisions into sentences, chapters, and verses make logical sense. Other times, these divisions separate what were clearly intended to be whole units.

The division of Ephesians 5:21 and 5:22 is one of the most dramatic examples of dividing what was clearly intended to be a whole thought. 5:22 is a phrase without a verb. The idea of submission comes from 5:21, in which submission is “to one another.”

It is simply irresponsible and misleading to take the idea of submission from 5:21, turn it into an imperative addressed only to women in 5:22, and then disconnect the idea from 5:21. Yet, this is exactly what many English translations do.

The King James Version of the Bible treated every verse as a new paragraph. Many of the newer translations separate chapters and verses into topical paragraphs. Some even add topic headings to the paragraphs.

If you investigate a series of English translations, you will find that some versions treat 5:21 as the closing sentence of a paragraph. Some treat is as a paragraph on its own. Some treat is as the opening sentence of a paragraph which includes 5:22.

The most misleading versions treat 5:22 as the first sentence of a new paragraph, under a heading.  For example,  the New International Version starts a new paragraph with 5:22, under the heading, “Wives and Husbands.”

What is the effect of these translation and publication decisions?  In the time and place in which Ephesians was written, the idea of submission to one another in marriage was a radically new idea. In contrast, there was nothing new in the idea that wives were to submit to their husbands.

As with so many radical ideas coming out of the New Testament, the original idea was lost, and replaced by traditional ideas. The radical vision of mutual submission reverted into a traditional power structure within marriage.

The translators who really do know better reinforce the traditional ideas by adding a verb that is not there, and treating 5:22 as a new paragraph, completely separate from 5:21.

Whether or not Mike Huckabee succeeds in his quest for the presidency, my point is that the Bible is a potent force in our political and social life, for believers and non-believers alike. The real problem is that often claims about the Bible are based on mistranslations and misinterpretations, which tend to reinforce traditional ideas about social status and roles. Ephesians 5:22 is a powerful example of such a mistranslation.

Every English translation I know has imposed a meaning that was not present in the Greek. And this is why Ephesians 5:22 does not command wives to submit to their husbands.

© Kalinda Rose Stevenson, PhD

The Bible is a controversial book because people have such
different beliefs about it. Some treat it as literal truth.
Some regard it as literature and moral guidance. Others
think that it is all nonsense.

No matter what you believe about the validity of the Bible,
the Bible continues to affect what people believe about many
important topics, such as the meaning of human life, human
worth, marriage, slavery, war, sex, government, and money.
Let’s pick just one topic that affects all of us. What is
the Biblical teaching about money?

As soon as we ask the question, we have to stop and analyze
the question itself. No matter what the topic, the biggest
problem for any question about “what the Bible teaches” is
that the Bible is not really a single book. We think of the
Bible as a single book because we can buy it as a single
book in the bookstore. But the word “Bible” comes from the
Greek word meaning “books.” The Bible is a collection of
books rather than a single book.

You will always find people who “prove” what “the Bible
teaches” on any particular topic because they can quote
particular Bible verses to make their case. You will also
find people who “prove” just the opposite based on other
Bible verses.

The solution to such contradictory efforts to “prove” what
“the Bible teaches” is to recognize that the Bible did not
originate as a single, organized, coherent book. It is a
collection of writing from different times and places,
written in different languages. In addition, these writings
have been edited, expanded, and then edited some more.

Another problem about biblical stories about money and
wealth is that they come from different economic systems
than the capitalist economy in which we live. Some of the
biblical stories are about nomads. They were herders rather
than farmers. Other stories come from an economic era based
on farming, in which wealth was based on land. Money in an
agrarian society based on farming was very different than
money in an economic era based on herding. And both are very
different from money in a capitalist era, when wealth is
based on money itself.

People often read the Bible as if they are stories written
in today’s newspaper. People will ignore the differences
between these economic systems, to look for direct answers
to apply directly to our own capitalist era.

If you want to know what “the Bible teaches about money,” do
you take the stories of a nomad, such as Abraham, who
amassed great wealth? Do you base your economic life on the
words of Jesus, “Blessed are the poor,” and believe that God
wants you to be poor? Or do you simply get confused with all
of the conflicting stories?

At a seminar about creating wealth, I saw a man who was
confused about what he thought the Bible teaches about
money. I heard him ask the speaker, “How can you say it is
good to be rich? Jesus said that a rich man cannot get into
heaven”

The first problem is that the man had misquoted a story told
in the Gospel of Matthew. (The same story is also told in
the Gospels of Mark and Luke.) “Then Jesus said to his
disciples, ‘Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich
man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than
for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’” (Matthew 19:
23-24.)

The most basic fact that the man did not understand was that
Jesus was telling the story in an agrarian society. A rich
man was part of the ruling class who controlled the land.
Wealth came from exploitation and abuse of the majority of
the population.

In its own context, the story was not about a being rich in
a capitalist economy, where it is possible to be rich
without exploiting other people. The man who asked the
question simply assumed that the words of Jesus could apply
directly to life in a capitalistic economy.

This is the kind of misunderstanding that happens again and
again when people use Bible verses without paying attention
to the economic context behind the story. The only real
answer to the man who asked the question at the seminar
would be to understand the point of the story in an agrarian
society.

Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D.

Going Broke With Jesus book  What if most of what you believe about Jesus and money is not true? Don’t let misinterpreted Bible stories block your abundance.

By Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D. 

If there is anyone who personified the essence of the dubious Christian belief that Jesus wants you to be broke, it was Mother Teresa.

For years, she was widely revered as an example of Christian selflessness. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in Calcutta among the poorest of the poor.

The mega-hit movie, “The Secret,” perpetuates this assessment of Mother Teresa. According to the movie, she knew and used the “Law of Attraction,” and did “so much good in the world.”

To challenge this public image of Mother Teresa as the epitome of Christian virtue is something like saying you don’t like dogs, that you are against motherhood, and apple pie, that you hate baseball. It is a taboo, a sacred cow. Who could possibly say anything critical of Mother Teresa?

The most recent issue of Time magazine (September 3, 2007 issue) devotes its cover story to Mother Theresa.
 
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html

The article, “The Secret Life Of Mother Teresa,” concerns a book about letters that Mother Teresa wrote over a period of fifty years. These were letters that she herself wanted destroyed. At this point, I have not read the book. I have only read the excerpts from the article in Time Magazine.

The letters make clear that Mother Teresa was a woman who lived with great conflict at her core about her relationship with God and with Jesus.

I must acknowledge that I always had my doubts about Mother Teresa, and her model of Christian service. Contrary to widespread belief that Mother Teresa was living the exemplary life of a true saint, I saw Mother Teresa as a prime exemplar of misguided devotion in the service of profoundly unbiblical theology.

Although I cannot explain everything I mean by this statement in a single article, the place to begin is with her apparent core belief that she herself was worth nothing.

She wrote that Jesus commanded her to serve the poor with these words:
“You are I know the most incapable person.-weak and sinful but just because you are that-I want to use you for My glory.”

In other words, the only way she could glorify Jesus was to serve the poorest of the poor, and to be poor herself. Yet, despite her willingness to be poor to glorify Jesus, she could not feel that God or Jesus loved her.

Behind Mother Teresa’s noble service was her belief that she herself was nothing. She wrote pained letters to spiritual advisors for more than fifty years. While Mother Teresa shared her anguish with spiritual advisors, she spoke publicly about living with the kind of love and joy that she herself didn’t feel.

Her letters, which are so contrary to her public image, leads to the question:  Was Mother Teresa a hypocrite?  At one level, she was. She knew that her public image didn’t match her inner experience.

Yet, hypocrisy is not the deepest truth about Mother Teresa. At her core, Mother Teresa endured anguish because she never felt loved.

This is not all that surprising. How can someone who is nothing feel that she is loved?  Nothing is nothing. How do you love nothing?  

Mother Teresa devoted her life to Jesus but had no assurance that she mattered as a person. While she spoke of God’s love for others, she herself felt abandoned, alone, unloved, and bereft of God’s love.
  
In this brief post, I can only begin to write about how much this core belief lies at the heart of so much Christian anguish, not just for Mother Teresa, but for others, including myself as a young child.

My own Christian education taught me what Mother Teresa learned. I was nothing. I was worth nothing. I deserved nothing. At the same time, I was obligated to meet the needs of others. This is a burden that is especially heavy on girls and women, who often learn that loving God means surrender of self in the service of others.

As a young female child growing up in a family where being female meant that I was flawed to the core, I learned from church that “God loves all men.”  There was never a moment when I felt included in that love, because I was that most defective of all creatures. I was a female child, and I believed at the deepest core of my being that God the Father had no love for me.

My book in progress, “Going Broke With Jesus,” is my own response to the anguish I read about in the letters of Mother Teresa and the anguish I experienced as a child growing up convinced that I mattered only to God as a servant, not as a person. I know that I am not alone in this core belief. 

I have encountered so many others who doubt their own worth, and much of it goes back to a distorted Christian teaching that the only people who matter are other people.
 
I have spent much of my adult life as a biblical scholar. I learned the biblical languages of Greek and Hebrew. I studied the economic and social conditions of the ancient world. I immersed myself in religious beliefs of the era.  My study demonstrated to me how much of what I learned violated the Bible itself.

After all of my study, I understand how Christian teaching can create anguish in the lives of both believers and non-believers because of what I call “Bad Bible.” Bad Bible” distorts the original intentions behind biblical writings to create human beings who believe that they are not worthy of love. They do not understand how the Bible has been used as a weapon against the weak. 

For me, Mother Teresa is the best example I know of the effect of “Bad Bible” on the weak. The tragedy is that she devoted herself, with utterly selfless devotion, to be an instrument of the kind of love that she herself could not feel. She offered compassion that she herself did not experience. She tried to relieve suffering while she herself endured anguish. In reality, no one can feel truly loved who is taught to think of herself as nothing.

Although Mother Teresa deserves compassion for her suffering, I return again to my central point. Mother Teresa is a prime example of misguided devotion in the service of profoundly unbiblical theology.