"Paul was not issuing an economic manifesto. He was telling a group of eschatological freeloaders to stop being weird"
~ Derrick Day
"Capitalism, Socialism, And Christians Who Ignore Jesus"
"Paul was a genuine intellectual titan, a Roman citizen who wrote Greek the way surgeons use scalpels, and many of his letters contain passages of devastating moral clarity. His chapter on love in First Corinthians has earned its place in every wedding since Gutenberg invented bulk printing.
But Paul had a worldview. It was hierarchical. Slaves were to obey masters. Women were to be silent. The Body of Christ had members with different functions, some more dignified than others. He was a man of his time, which means he was also a man shaped by Roman patronage culture, where your value was inseparable from your productivity and your productivity was inseparable from your place in the social order.
Jesus had no such worldview. Or rather, his worldview was a direct assault on that one. He praised a widow’s two pennies over a rich man’s substantial donation. He elevated a Samaritan — a religious and ethnic outgroup — as the moral exemplar in what is probably his most famous parable. He positioned a child, the lowest-status person in first-century Jewish society, as the model for entering the Kingdom of God.
Paul’s theology organized people. Jesus’ theology disordered them — intentionally, radically, and with what one suspects was a fair amount of pleasure.
As one Christian minister and theologian writing for Radical Discipleship puts it, the word 'capital' simply means money, and capitalism is 'moneyism' — a system that strives to place money at the center of all human life. Jesus, according to the Gospels, said plainly: 'You cannot serve God and money.' The conflict is not subtle. It is definitional."
~ D. Day
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