Hello, everyone! Apologies for my continued absence as I have finished up my dissertation. The first complete draft has been sent off to my advisors and I await their feedback with equal parts excitement and terror.
Alas, in the rush I missed posting my annual July 4 reflection. However, the very first such reflection I ever posted was not on July 4 itself, but on the occasion of a belated July 4 event being held in September of that year. So this year I will repeat the tradition (yes, it’s a “tradition” now, because I say so) and post my annual reflection in September again this year.
In the meantime, I did squeeze in a writing gig for the wonderful folks at the Eventide Center for Faith & Investing. Part one of a two-part series is titled “Can an Ancient Bible Guide Modern Investors?”
Most Christian investing today is shaped more by the culture than by the Bible. That’s a problem. Still, it’s not as surprising as it might seem. After all, how is it even possible for the Bible to inform contemporary investing, given that it was written millennia before the advent of our modern financial markets?
That may seem like a simple question – if we think the only contribution the Bible makes to our decision-making is to lay down a few broad ethical boundaries we have to stay within. But if we want the Bible to guide us in a deeper and more profound way, we have to ask how the Bible can play that role in an area like investing, where our social world is so vastly different from the one in which the Bible was written.
Indeed, the only reason modern financial markets are even possible is because we figured out that some of the most clear and direct statements the Bible makes about investing (i.e., lending in the expectation of profit) simply don’t apply to the kind of investments we typically make now. As modern economic structures like corporations , banks, and insurance firms began to form in the late medieval and early modern period, theological scholars (especially of the Salamanca School) showed that we could draw a clear distinction between the kind of loans that were empowering these new structures – loans to businesses, which can afford to take prudent risks – and the kind of loans forbidden in the Old Testament – loans to people in need, whose distress should not be exploited for gain.
But if modern financial markets only came into existence by drawing this distinction between the biblical world and ours, where does that leave us when it comes to applying the Bible to our investing? Fortunately, recent theological thinking points us in a helpful direction.
Part 2 coming your way next week, Lord willing!
Update: Here’s Part 2!
With the benefits of economic growth in mind, we can see that even making a return can be part of the good we can do through investing. Our primary purpose should be to serve others and bring life to the world. However, if we invest in enterprises that are doing genuinely good and life-giving work, then the growth of our portfolios is not only good for us, it’s good for the poor and for the common good. It reflects the fruitfulness that God has infused into his good world.
Ultimately, this is an important way we can participate in the biblical story of God’s creation of the world as a dynamic, growing and changing project entrusted to human stewardship. God did not just put Adam and Eve in the garden to maintain the world as it was. His intent was that we develop creation’s potential, so it would glorify God more and more over time. The modern stock investment system makes it possible to create new things and develop the world, taking our place in the biblical story of the growth of God’s world.
On the one hand, we are summoned to overcome the self-centered focus on returns for ourselves that dominates our cultural investing paradigm. On the other hand, we need not embrace – we actually ought to avoid – approaches that deprecate ordinary stock investing as having no moral value and no intrinsic place in God’s story of justice, or that recognize stock investing as valuable only in highly specialized contexts or only if certain very specific demands are met. Instead, we should explore how our portfolios can bring life to the world.