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When my secular friends read Jesus on wealth they are often confused. Inevitably they ask me how it’s possible for Christians to support capitalism and wealth accumulation. When they read Jesus telling the rich young ruler that in order to inherit eternal life he must sell all of his possessions, give the money to the poor, and only then can he follow Him, it seems impossible to them that people who claim to follow this man Jesus could support an economic system that encourages the endless pursuit of wealth. And the truth is that it would not be possible without a series of theological and hermeneutical innovations that have developed a Christian imagination capable of reading Jesus, and believing with conviction, that he is saying the opposite of what he is actually saying.

A quick example is found in this same story. When the rich man turns away from Jesus, finding himself unwilling to part from his wealth, Jesus tells his disciples the famous line, “…it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” This sounds pretty open and shut.

But almost everyone in the American church has heard this sermon about the gate.

The eye of the needle, the preacher explains, was a low gate in the wall of Jerusalem. A camel could get through it. Just not standing up, and not loaded. It had to kneel, and everything on its back had to come off first. So Jesus wasn’t saying the thing was impossible. Only that it was a matter of humility and priorities or in other words a matter of the heart. As long as the rich man doesn’t love his wealth so much that he is unwilling to part with it when it is time to enter the pearly gates, he should be fine.

And every temporarily embarrassed billionaire in the pews releases a collective sigh of relief. One small problem…There was no gate.

It’s a total fabrication with no historical or archaeological evidence that it ever existed. The earliest mention of it turns up in a collection of commentary that Thomas Aquinas assembled in the thirteenth century, in an unsigned note that later got credited to an archbishop of Canterbury who died in 1109. Which puts the earliest known version of that sermon roughly a thousand years after the man it claims to explain.

I’m starting with a fake gate because it’s easy to catch. It makes a claim about a wall, and walls leave evidence, and when the evidence isn’t there you can say so out loud and anyone who has any integrity will concede.

But, the theological move happening underneath it makes no claim you can check at all. That one is older than the gate story, it is a malignancy that has metastasized throughout the body of Christ.

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Two Poles, One Tent

The last installment in this series laid out what the church actually taught about money for most of its first thousand years. If you haven’t read it yet you should go do that. But here’s a quick reminder.

The earth belongs to God, made for the benefit of everyone, and your ownership of anything is like a talent the master has given you to put to work for His people. Your excess wealth is already the property of the hungry, and keeping it is theft. Hoarding wealth when others are dying from need is a kind of murder. Money must never be made to breed money… aka earning and charging interest. Nearly everything we codify into law under capitalism violates the fundamental ethics of Christianity. This week and I debated Michael Knowles, Doug Wilson, and Fr. Gerald Murray on whether socialism is compatible with Christianity. Their primary argument is that socialism codifies theft into law. But, as I have shown, according to the Scripture and the faithful reading of Scripture from the church fathers, wealth accumulation in the presence of urgent need of others is not only theft but murder, and capitalist Christians have no problem codifying that into law.

I’m not even talking about the easy target of the cartoonish prosperity gospel. Most people already know to laugh at that. And fixating on it allows capitalist christians of all shapes and sizes to feel clean. I’m after the church that would never be caught dead near Benny Hinn. The ones with the American flag and the ones with the Pride banner out front. The ones who spurn Creflo Dollar, but vote republican and the ones that run the food pantry and vote democrat. The ones that love the billionaires and the ones that decry them, but are still dreaming of capitalism with a human face.

So how did both of those groups of Christians end up accepting an economy that runs on exploitation, militarism, racism, and imperialism, and calling it the only realistic option? Mind you, all while imagining that they inhabit radically different positions instead of just being support poles on the opposite side of the same circus tent that masquerades as the church.

Four Tricks

The Scripture and the writings of the church fathers still say what they said. What happened is that the church learned to read them differently. In the next several installments of this series I am going to cover four theological developments, worked out over centuries by serious and often holy people, each one often defensible on its own terms, which together evolved into a mutant caricature of Christian economics that flips Jesus and eleven centuries of Christian teaching on their head.

1. Move the demand from your hands to your heart.

2. Make the world as it currently stands look like God’s own arrangement.

3. Take a flat prohibition and turn it inside out until it means its opposite.

4. And underneath all three, the one that isn’t an argument at all: let the church own enough, borrow enough, lend enough, and lean on wealthy donors enough that its own interests start doing the reading for you.

And when we’re finished with all four, we’ll get to the part I’m genuinely excited about, because these theological innovations and sleights of hand are not the end of the story. There have always been Christians who remained faithful to the church’s vocation of participating in the cosmic liberation from the powers and principalities. We are going to seek them out and see what they have to say about how a person is supposed to live now, in this economy, with a job, a kid who needs new shoes and how we can build a genuinely Christian future together, which as David Bentley Hart says can only be something like “…a new spiritual cosmopolitanism, purged of the pathos of identity altogether, answerable not to ancestral ghosts in their intransigently local haunts, but only to the festive unity of boundless differences.” Which of course is going to involve Christian participation in something like international socialism.

A Saint With a Problem

So who were these tricksters that planted the virus? The truth is that they were not cynics or enemies. Many of them held to the teachings we have covered so far and would likely be appalled at what has been made of their work.

You already met the first one earlier in this series.

Clement of Alexandria showed up twice in the last essay, both times on my side of the argument. He is the one who said God determined that the use of things should be common and that God’s law forbids you to lend at interest to a brother. He taught in Alexandria, my beloved Origen studied under him, and the church has counted him among its greatest teachers and spiritual patriarchs for eighteen centuries.

Around the year 200 he had a pastoral dilemma on his hands. Alexandria was an affluent port city that controlled critical grain supplies and trade routes that fed the Mediterranean world. And by this point the church was increasingly drawing converts with real wealth. Upon hearing Mark 10 read aloud, they were distraught at what Jesus told the rich man to do, and they wanted to know whether there was any hope for them at all. And so Clement set out to comfort and instruct his wealthy converts who were deeply anxious that their possessions barred them from heaven.

Members of his flock were asking him if they were already damned. Clement told them, no.

In response he wrote a little number entitled Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved? He kept every hard saying exactly where it was. He never said wealth was good. And in the course of answering that frightened man he assembled an argument, five steps, every one of them reasonable, that the church has been using ever since to hear something other than what the text says.

Next week we’re going to take a deep look at it and follow its impact to our present day.

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Brief Clarification after the fact:
Something that I wish I would’ve communicated better, which I did say more or less in the essay, is that myself and Connie certainly believe that the argument extends past what it means to straight men and absolutely includes LGBTQ+ people. But that, despite not being the focus of this particular video from her, Elijah and David’s culture war informed response stopped them from being able to receive even the part of the argument that I think they should have agreed with that this particular video and essay was about.

This week I had friends make a video critiquing another friend, and for a guy who really likes having friends and would prefer everyone else be friends too, that sort of thing is always a little stressful for me.

Everyone involved is somebody I like. Nobody here is a grifter. Nobody is arguing in bad faith. Elijah Lamb and David Latting clearly believe they are protecting something beautiful in Scripture from an interpretation that reduces it. I take that seriously and I have made the same defensive move myself about things I loved. I’m kinda doing it right now.

But this disagreement sits on top of some of the most interesting questions in Christian theology… what a metaphor is allowed to do, whether earthly marriage explains the union of Christ and the Church or participates in it, whether male and female belong to the eternal nature of humanity, who is permitted to discover new implications in Scripture, and underneath all of it, whether the Spirit is finished speaking through the revelation already given in Christ. And I couldn’t help but feel like we could all benefit from hearing these questions out.

So let me spill the tea.

My friend Connie Chen, a brilliant Harvard Divinity School–trained theologian, made a reel that begins:

“Did you know that the Bible ends with men in wedding dresses? That every man in the church is already in a queer marriage with Christ?”

From there she moves quickly… because it’s a reel. She talks about how the Old Testament repeatedly portrays God’s relationship with Israel as a marriage, and Israel includes men. And how Ephesians 5 identifies the union of husband and wife with the mystery of Christ and the Church. Finally, she points out that Revelation closes with the marriage supper of the Lamb, where the Bride is the New Jerusalem and every male believer is included within her.

The reel was promoting a longer essay on her Substack, that you should absolutely subscribe to, called Holy Shit. In the essay Connie argues that bridal identity is part of the grammar of salvation, and that this should do something to Christian men. A man who knows himself as Bride learns receptivity, surrender, tenderness, and covenantal intimacy. He can receive care without shame. He can stop calling domination protection and emotional withholding strength. He can desire closeness with other men without constantly investigating whether tenderness threatens his masculinity.

The essay ends with her saying,

“The male wife receives care without shame, desires tenderness and surrender and intimacy with other men. The male wife does not become less straight. The male wife becomes less compulsory.

The male wife is free.”

In response, Elijah and David, who are two of the smarter and more good faith conservative Christian content creators out there, made a somewhat harsh reel reacting to Connie’s video saying that they don’t think hers is an honest reading of the text. They argue, more or less, that Connie has made three mistakes. First, the Bride is the corporate Church, not each individual Christian man. Second, the union of Christ and the Church is an analogy drawn from male-female marriage, and Connie is illegitimately importing modern categories into an ancient image. Third, she has sexualized a spiritual metaphor, stopping at what Elijah calls its “fleshiest part” instead of seeing through the image into the greater divine reality it describes.

Underneath those objections is a larger theory of interpretation. Scripture, they argue, has thousands of years of accumulated meaning around it. It cannot be treated like “Play-Doh”, reshaped around contemporary culture, or made to say something new simply because a modern reader finds the new meaning compelling.

Put together, that sounds like a coherent case. The problem is that the entire argument begins with a misreading of their own. They hear the word queer and translate it almost immediately into sex.

The big oops

Across their video, Elijah and David respond to Connie with phrases like “human sexual relationship,” “post-sexual-revolution views of love and eroticism,” “modern sexual categories,” “sexualization,” and “the fleshiest part of the metaphor.”

But that is not primarily what Connie’s video or essay is about. Connie explicitly mentions sexual orientation once, and only to say that being a male wife of God does not have to make you less straight. In this video and essay she does not sexualize the Christ-Church relationship or discuss sex acts. Her argument is about gendered posture, intimacy, power, and masculinity as enforced by our cultural context.

Her operative categories are receptivity, surrender, tenderness, shame, domination, emotional control, receiving care, and intimacy between men.

They accuse her of reducing the metaphor to sex because they have already reduced the word queer to sex.

Certainly the word includes gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities, and Connie is not hiding that her argument belongs within contemporary queer theology. But in a major stream of queer theory, queer also functions as a verb. To queer something is to expose the instability of an arrangement presented as natural, permanent, or compulsory.

By that definition the gospel queers nearly everything it touches. The first become last. The foolish shame the wise. A crucified criminal is revealed as the Lord of glory. Enemies are loved. The poor inherit a kingdom. Jews and Gentiles become one body. The social identities by which people know who is above and who is beneath are not merely reversed. They are judged from the vantage point of a new creation.

The gospel also changed what it meant to be a man. In the Roman world masculinity was organized around status, mastery, and who occupied the active or dominant position. A free man could sexually use a male slave without any loss of masculine honor, because the slave’s subordination confirmed his power. Paul’s prohibitions cut straight through that. Their effect was to remove a privilege that first-century masculinity had assumed as a birthright… the bodies of people beneath you in the social order were no longer available for your use. That reorganized what a man was, queering the masculinity of their time.

Connie is asking the same kind of question about the Bride. What happens when a man is placed in the position of the beloved, the one being pursued, cleansed, adorned, and drawn toward union? She is not asking whether Jesus is entering millions of separate sexual marriages with Christian men, but what it means for a man to participate personally in a corporate identity that Scripture represents as feminine and bridal.

The deeper charge underneath their whole response seems to be a conviction that Connie’s insistence, that the metaphor should inform our gender expression, is a modern imposition on a tradition that has always treated not only the biological distinction between male and female, but also the social roles society places on them, as fixed and eternal. The problem with that is it’s just not the whole story. Two of the most important voices in the tradition point the other way. Gregory of Nyssa distinguishes humanity’s creation in the divine image from the later division into male and female. For Gregory the Image of God itself is not sexed, because God is not sexed. Maximus the Confessor picks up Gregory’s point and goes further, insisting that in the eschaton the division between male and female is one of the five divisions Christ overcomes in creation on the way to deification.¹ Maximus says that Christ:

“drove out from nature the difference and division into male and female,” a difference “which He in no way needed in order to become human, and without which existence would perhaps have been possible. There is no need for this division to last perpetually, for in Christ Jesus, says the divine apostle, there is neither male nor female.”

I have written about this in greater detail in another essay you can find here, so I wont say too much more about it. But, For clarity sake let’s hear from Maximus on this one more time. The human person, he says, is meant to reach God by “completely shaking off from nature the property of male and female, which in no way was linked to the original principle of the divine plan concerning human generation.”

Maximus has no concept of queer theory, no category of sexual orientation, nothing of our debates. But when he says the division of male and female is something Christ heals rather than perfects, and that the human being of the age to come is neither male nor female but simply human, he is saying that our present condition is not the last word about who we are. Theosis is God drawing the whole human person past the divisions we now take for fixed, until in the end the division itself is gone. If you want a contemporary word for a reality that will not sit still inside the categories we treat as natural and final, queer is not a bad one.

Neither of these church fathers was writing modern queer theory, they didn’t have access to our categories. But both refuse to treat present sexual difference as the eternal architecture of humanity, which is exactly the assumption the objection depends on.

Now, none of this obligates Elijah and David to agree with me and Connie or with Gregory and Maximus. After all the tradition doesn’t speak with one voice. Augustine insists in City of God that women rise as women in the resurrection. That is a real disagreement inside the tradition, and it should be honored as one.

But that’s my point. The accusation that Connie is bastardizing the text with modern sexual ethics and gender ideology, because she is reading a metaphor metaphorically and talking about how it might impact the way men’s masculinity is expressed, has to be either unaware of what Gregory and Maximus argued or pretend they didn’t. The idea that maleness and femaleness are fixed, ultimate, and eternal is not the neutral reading of Scripture or church tradition that a queer reading corrupts. It’s one reading among others that some of the tradition’s most serious minds came down on the other side of. To treat this as a settled door that only swung open after the sexual revolution is to not know your own house.

And just as a reminder, Connie doesn’t even go that far in the video they are reacting to or in the longer essay. She is simply insisting that men being included in the feminine role in the bridal metaphor, should impact the way Christian men live in the world, and explicitly says that this doesn’t have to mean your sexual identity. That Christian masculinity cannot be identical to secular masculinity because the Gospel queers us from worldly categories, we are a strange and peculiar people. Or at least we are supposed to be.

“I am not the bride of Christ”

Elijah begins his response here:

“First of all, I am not the bride of Christ. I am not married to Christ. Christ is not my husband. We, the church, plural, we will be married to Christ in his coming.”

He is right that the Bride is corporate. Israel, the Church, the New Jerusalem, these are corporate identities. No individual Christian is the whole Bride. And Connie’s reel does move quickly from “men belong to the Bride” to “you are the wife” without showing every step. Short form content is not always the easiest place to show all your steps, thats why she wrote a longer essay that the video points to.

But corporate identity and personal participation are not rivals in Christian theology. I am not the entire Body of Christ, and Paul still calls me a member of it. I am not the whole temple, and Paul still tells the Corinthians their individual bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. The corporate reality is what the individual participates in and it is supposed to change us.

That is also how the tradition treated bridal imagery. Origen and Gregory of Nyssa read the Bride in the Song of Songs as both the Church and the individual, and Bernard of Clairvaux preached that identification directly to a monastery full of men 86 times over 18 years, he was kinda obsessed with it.² The word queer is contemporary. The individual Christian man inhabiting the position of the Bride as a part of the corporate body is not.

So the corporate point clarifies Connie’s language, but it does not defeat her argument. A male Christian is not one of Christ’s millions of separate wives. He personally participates in the one bridal body. The real question is what that participation is allowed to mean.

Which marriage is the original

Elijah explains the analogy:

“The union between Christ and the church is analogous to what we experience down here on earth between men and women in marriage. So no, there is not a queer marriage happening in heaven, but rather the father created humanity as a gift to the son and that we will experience perfect union with Christ and in Christ in new creation such that it mirrors what we call weddings and marriages on earth.”

There is a sense in which the first part is true. We learn through realities we already know. We have been to weddings, so the wedding imagery gives us language for covenant, fidelity, and union with God. That is the direction in which we come to understand the mystery.

But I think Elijah is treating the union as only a metaphor, a picture borrowed from marriage to help us imagine how much God loves the Church, and I think that is a little backwards. Paul doesn’t use marriage to illustrate something alone. In Ephesians 5 he quotes Genesis about two becoming one flesh and says, “This is a great mystery, but I am speaking about Christ and the church.” The word Greek Paul uses for mystery is mystērion, which Latin renders sacramentum, this is where we get the word sacrament. The union of Christ and the Church is not a figure of speech or an illustration about weddings. It’s what the church believes weddings are pointing to. Yes, earthly marriage gives us language for it. But earthly marriage is the sign, and the union with with God in Christ is what the sign participates in and is exceeded by.

This is why the church calls marriage a sacrament and not simply a metaphor. A sacrament is not a picture or representation of an absent thing. It is a real, partial participation in a greater reality, the way the bread is not a prop standing in for an absent Christ that we remember. Christian marriage is a foretaste of a union in which we become one in and with and through Christ. Even still the meal is not fully captured by the foretaste, it nourishes, but it also increases our hunger for it. Kinda like Everette in Oh Brother Where Art Thou telling Delmar that a third of a gopher would only arouse his appetite without having another to bed her back down. Elijah’s framing risks keeping the whole thing safely inside “analogy,” he is making the sign smaller than it is, treating a genuine anticipation of our future in God as though it were a helpful comparison we could set down once we get the point.

The Fourth Lateran Council teaches that between the creature and the Creator no similarity can be noted without a greater dissimilarity having to be noted between them. However much the union of Christ and the Church resembles a marriage, in other words, it is more unlike our marriages than like them. The sign is real, and the reality it signifies overflows it.

I don’t want this to sound like it’s just a quibble over metaphysics or me correcting Elijah for no good reason other than to do it. If the union of Christ and the Church is only an analogy, a picture of something that will happen to us someday, then it makes no claim on us now. We can admire it, look forward to it, and go on being whatever we already were. But if Christian marriage is a real participation in that union, a foretaste we are already tasting, then the union is not waiting for us in the age to come. It has reached back and taken hold of us in the present, and it is already at work changing what we are. Elijah keeps the whole thing at arm’s length by calling it a simple analogy. In doing so he takes the most transformative image in the New Testament, our participation in the very union of God, and turns it into a comparison we can appreciate without being altered by it. That is the real cost of stopping at metaphor. Not that he gets the mechanics wrong, but that he defuses the thing before it can do to him what it is for. Which is why Connie insists that we let the future reality of men being a part of the bride, inform what kind of men we are today. Will the bride prepare herself for her wedding or will she show up looking like a hot mess?

There is one more piece of that sentence worth noticing. Elijah says the Father “created humanity as a gift to the Son.” That is a beautiful line that I have no problem with. But it's a synthesis of several passages about the Father giving a people to the Son, drawn together into a systematic claim… the kind of theology often associated with the Reformed covenant of redemption. I only bring this up to note that Elijah has read a whole systematic structure into the text in the very sentence where he insists that Connie cannot say more about the union than the text explicitly says. He is already doing the thing they are about to tell Connie she may not do.

Is Scripture stone or Play-Doh

David compares Connie’s interpretation with Rudolf Bultmann’s program of demythologization and says that Bultmann’s work was a response to the rise of postmodernism. But his history is off by a little… postmodernism wouldn’t be around for a few more decades. Bultmann dropped “New Testament and Mythology” in 1941, responding to modern scientific consciousness and Heidegger, his colleague at Marburg.³ But the real problem is that Connie is doing the opposite of what he describes. She isn’t removing the mythic image. She stays inside it, with its gender, clothing, bodies, and desire. She refuses to let “Bride of Christ” collapse into “God loves the Church very much.” And the accusation David makes, that Connie is forming the text around the culture to make it more palatable, gets the direction backwards. Our culture is at war with itself over sex and masculinity, so there is no single audience to flatter here. What Connie is actually doing is letting the strangest, most mythic parts of the text keep their power to unsettle us, which is the opposite of sanding them down to fit the moment.

David says we cannot treat Scripture like Play-Doh or “read something new into the text.” But Christianity could never have survived on a rule that strict. The examples are far too numerous to list. Paul reads Hagar and Sarah and turns them into two covenants. He points at the rock the Israelites drank from in the wilderness and says that the rock was Christ. Ephesians 5, as we have already read, takes a Genesis text about marriage and makes it about Christ and the Church. And Peter stands up at Pentecost and references the oracle in Joel saying, “This is that.”

Origen, and most of the church after him, read The Song of Songs, a book of erotic poetry about two lovers, as Christ and the Church, a book whose plain sense mentions neither. Gregory of Nyssa did not think he was suffocating the Song by finding the ascent of the soul in it. He thought the Spirit had made it deep enough to say more to us than it does explicitly.

That is the founding hermeneutic of Pentecostalism. As a fourth-generation Pentecostal pastor’s kid I grew up watching preachers read ancient Scripture and declare that the Spirit was disclosing their meaning for this room, in this moment. From what I understand Elijah and David are also Pentecostal, or at least Charismatic. Pentecostals and Charismatics reject cessationism because they believe the Spirit still heals, speaks, and surprises the Church. But a theology in which the Spirit may still heal a body or give a word, yet may not disclose a previously unrecognized implication of the revelation already given in Christ through the Scripture, is just hermeneutical cessationism.

Remember Elijah’s own words about humanity being a “gift to the Son,” a beautiful systematic construction he read into the text. That is how theology works, and everyone does it. It’s not a question of wether or not we can we move beyond the direct wording of individual verses, but whether the movement is faithful to Christ, accountable to Scripture, and able to bear good fruit.

This is why David Bentley Hart describes tradition as apocalyptic. It’s not a settled quantity deposited in the past and handed forward unchanged… tradition is determined by the final unveiling of Christ toward which the Church is still moving. If it were, the doctrinal history of the church would have to be read as a history of corruption, because it’s full of genuine novelty. Tradition is something whose identity is set by an end that hasn’t arrived. Fidelity to it looks like an expectation and openness to the Spirit that is still revealing the mysteries, not mere curation of what has been settled. Christ has been fully given, but Christ has not yet been fully received.

The beautiful little flower

Which brings us to the most revealing moment in the video. Elijah says:

“This recurring biblical description that puts human beings and creation and the church on the feminine side of the relationship with God does not infringe upon my masculinity in any way. I feel like a beautiful little flower in the hand of God. That doesn’t make me feel insecure. I have no problem with that.”

I love that sentence. There are entire denominations where a man could not say he feels like a beautiful little flower in the hand of God without immediately reaching for a joke.

But the sentence concedes almost everything Connie needs. Scripture places human beings, creation, and the Church on the feminine side of the relationship with God. Men are included. The gender role crossing is there. The disagreement is no longer whether a man can inhabit a symbolically feminine position, because Elijah just said he can. The disagreement is what that position is allowed to do us.

Elijah lets the image describe how a man stands before God. Connie asks whether that posture should also reorganize how he stands among other men. Does the man who is pursued, received, and loved as Bride become less invested in authority and domination? Can he receive care without reading it as weakness, or surrender without reading it as defeat, or want tenderness from other men without opening an investigation into whether he is still masculine enough?

What many Christians call biblical masculinity is not a pristine thing carried intact from the apostles into the present. Ancient patriarchy, a century of American breadwinner ideology, and everything in between have contributed to the man many churches now present as timeless. But a modern evangelical man who marries for love, doesn’t own his wife as property, and cannot assert himself sexually onto his male slaves would not be recognizable as masculine in the eyes of a first century Roman citizen. Connie hasn’t added culture to a culture-free reading. But she has exposed that their reading was cultural the whole time. She made the invisible assumption visible. She let the gospel queer our identity on it’s way to being transfigured.

Elijah’s flower is not a refutation of her argument. It’s where her argument begins. The man who truly knows himself as a beautiful little flower in the hand of God should become a different kind of man among other people. I hope he does decide to let the Scripture’s description of him as a part of the bride infringe on his carnal masculinity, and in the little bit I’ve gotten to know him I suspect he already has because he’s a pretty good dude.

Who is suffocating the metaphor

Interestingly, there are a few things the fellas could have disagreed with Connie on that I might have been inclined to agree with them about. For example, “Chosen family” is a warm but imprecise description of a Trinity whose relations are eternal and constitutive of each hypostatic identity rather than a post hoc election made by self possessed individuals. There are 2 or 3 other real points a critic could press in her essay.

Elijah and David do not press them. The missed chance at the Trinity challenge is especially interesting, because Elijah is currently doing really great work on the Trinity, check out his most recent Substack article on it here, it’s a banger. Instead they go after the strongest thing she said and leave the weak things alone. They reject the interesting claim… that men participate personally in a feminine bridal identity, and that this participation might change how Christian masculinity is imagined.

They say she has shrunk something beautiful into a “weak, puny version of the real thing”. But which reading is smaller? One says the bridal image communicates spiritual intimacy with God and leaves our worldly categories of masculinity and hierarchy undisturbed. The other says humanity is being drawn into a union earthly marriage can only partly anticipate and sample where men are scandalously included on the receptive side, that present worldly hierarchies are exposed as provisional, and that masculinity is opened to tenderness and dependence.

David is right when he says in the video that people today hunger for myth, saints, and mystery. But a true myth is not safe decoration. As Tolkien argued to his friend Jack on a late-night walk, and as Jack later put it in his own words, "the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened." It works on us, it rearranges the world, it queers our identities including our masculinity. To refuse to let it is to do the work of demythologizing. Connie’s reel and essay took the image of the Bride and played it at full volume, and it made people uncomfortable, because that is what a living symbol does.

So before we accuse her of suffocating the metaphor, we should sit with the possibility that we have allowed the Bride to breathe only so long as she promises not to change us.

I like having friends I can disagree with

I didn’t write this to “own” Elijah or David. The truth is that I suspect I haven’t really taught them much of anything in this essay, beyond maybe a clarification about the timeline between Bultmann and postmodernism. David and Elijah are genuinely smart dudes who are in seminary themselves. They make great content all the time about a lot of the things I talked about in this essay. It was a recent clip I saw of David that reminded me of the conversation between C.S. Lewis and Tolkien that I used two paragraphs ago. But, I think they made a fundamental yet understandable error by interpreting Connie’s reel to be about sex when it wasn’t, ironically reading things into her text that aren’t there, and inviting, as of the time of writing this sentence, 150,000 people to mock and ridicule her unfairly. And I think that colored their entire commentary, blurring their vision and creating a few errors they otherwise might not have made. This is why before writing this I asked them if it would be ok for me to do so and suggested that their disagreement might be rooted in a misunderstanding.

That being said, I do think there are good reasons to extend some of this into the questions that pertain specifically to LGBTQ+ affirmation. I don’t think the bridal language in Scripture is enough to do all of that on it’s own and I would probably roll my eyes at a video that tried to argue it is. But, I have written other essays about those questions that you can find in my recent posts, so I’m not going to get into it now.

For now, I will leave you with an excerpt from Connie’s essay:

Sources Cited and Consulted:

_{On the church fathers reading the Bride as both the Church and the individual soul: Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs starts the tradition, and Gregory of Nyssa’s Homilies on the Song of Songs (trans. Richard Norris, SBL, 2012) carries it forward. Bernard of Clairvaux’s eighty-six Sermons on the Song of Songs are where a man preaches it directly to a room full of monks.}

_{On sexual difference in the age to come: the Maximus passages are from Ambiguum 41, in Nicholas Constas’s translation (On Difficulties in the Church Fathers, Harvard, 2014). Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Making of Man (ch. 16–17) is where the divine image comes apart from the male/female division. I worked through all of this at much greater length in my earlier essay.}

_{On women rising as women: Augustine, City of God 22.17.}

_{On the greater dissimilarity between Creator and creature: the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Canon 2.}

_{On Bultmann: the lecture is “New Testament and Mythology” (1941). David Congdon’s “Demystifying the Program of Demythologizing” (Harvard Theological Review, 2017) is good on why it wasn’t the crude myth-deletion project it’s remembered as.}

_{On tradition as apocalyptic: David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse (Baker Academic, 2022).}

_{On queer as a verb rather than an identity: the framing traces to David Halperin, Saint Foucault (Oxford, 1995), and gets worked out theologically in Gerard Loughlin, ed., Queer Theology (Blackwell, 2007). For the patristics-and-gender material Connie and I are both drawing on, Sarah Coakley’s God, Sexuality and the Self and Eugene Rogers’s Sexuality and the Christian Body are both worth reading.}

_{On Roman masculinity and sexual status: Craig Williams, Roman Homosexuality (Oxford, 2nd ed. 2010).}

_{On the “true myth” line: it’s C.S. Lewis, from his October 18, 1931 letter to Arthur Greeves, recounting the late-night Addison’s Walk conversation with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. Humphrey Carpenter’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography reconstructs Tolkien’s side of that night.}

This is Part 4 of an ongoing series called The Future of Christianity is Communionist. If you’re reading this for the first time, start with Part 1, which lays the theological foundation everything else builds on.

On the first day of Church History 101, our professor Dr. Jim Shelton, a delightful Catholic Pentecostal scholar, invited us to imagine early Christians stepping into our home church and asked if we thought they would know it was a Christian worship service. The student’s answers were all over the place, but eventually most of us agreed they would probably think we were worshiping a strange white sheet with images magically projected onto it. It’s a funny scenario to imagine, and the analysis goes beyond the mere aesthetics.

But, I think an even more interesting version of this thought experiment is to imagine 21st century Christians being transported back in time and, with the help of their AI translating devices, listening in on early Christian teaching about money and property. When they heard someone say “the spare coat hanging unused in your closet rightfully belongs to the man freezing outside,” would they be offended? If that was followed up with exhortations that the bread going stale in their kitchen is the property of the hungry, and that holding on to more than you need while your neighbor has nothing is theft and no different from robbing him in the street…. would they know they were listening to Christian teaching or would they nervously start backing toward the door worried they had landed in some kind of pagan proto-marxist organizing rally?

Somewhere between the early church and the church most of us were raised in, the fundamental Christian perspective on economy came to sound like a Godless alien threat, the kind talking heads on CNN and Fox have been warning you about for decades.

So WTF happened?!

Nobody went back and rewrote the homilies. Basil is still a saint. The lines about the coat and the bread are still sitting in his collected works, still assigned as seminary readings by professors that would call you a communist for repeating them at coffee hour.

But before you can understand how we got here, you first have to understand how wild it was to begin with. You could wave off one fiery bishop on a bad morning as anecdotal. What the record actually shows is that across centuries and continents, in Greek and Latin and Syriac, bishops who never met and who disagreed violently about the Trinity and the nature of Christ agreed on a specific set of convictions about what the scripture taught regarding wealth and how that must shape the Christian life. And what they agreed on would get a pastor fired from most American churches today.

When Jerome wants to explain why Jesus called money the mammon of iniquity, he reaches for a common proverb of his day, saying “For all riches proceed from injustice, and unless one has lost, the other cannot find. So this proverb seems to me most true: either a rich man is unjust or he has inherited from an unjust man.” He offers it as ordinary common sense, the kind of thing that needs no defense because his readers have heard it their whole lives.

In this essay I’m going to cover four claims that recur across these theologians, stated so often and bluntly that they read more like a refrain, born out of the obvious reading of Scripture, than arguments. By no means are the examples provided here close to exhaustive.

1. The earth belongs to everyone. Private ownership is a lease, not a deed.

"we who valued above all things the acquisition of wealth and possessions, now bring what we have into a common stock, and communicate to everyone in need." — Justin Martyr, First Apology 14, c. 155, Rome

"One in mind and soul, we do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another. All things are common among us but our wives." — Tertullian, Apology 39, c. 197, Carthage

“You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor. You are handing over to him what is his.” — Ambrose of Milan, 4th c., northern Italy

“Not to share our own riches with the poor is a robbery of the poor, and a depriving them of their livelihood; and that which we possess is not only our own, but also theirs.” — John Chrysostom, 4th c., Antioch and Constantinople

“The things and possessions that are in the world are common to all, like the light and this air that we breathe, as well as the pasture for the dumb animals on the plains and on the mountains. All these things were made for all in common solely for use and enjoyment; in terms of ownership they belong to no one. — Symeon the New Theologian, 11th c., Constantinople (Quote continued in the next section)

Like I said in the last installment, the Didache, the oldest how-to manual the church has, already told regular congregations somewhere around the year 100 to “share everything with your brother and call nothing your own.” This is not some fourth-century drift that set in once Christianity got powerful and started overthinking things. It’s there at the root, before there was a canon of Scripture or bishops in palaces. And then it just runs. Clement of Alexandria, writing to the wealthy Christians of Egypt around 200, says God “determined that the use should be common.” Lactantius, in North Africa a century later, says God “gave the earth in common to all... not that mad and raging avarice might claim all things for itself.” Cyril, back in Alexandria in the 400s, says flatly that “it is no man’s own by right of nature that he is rich.” Gregory the Great, in Rome around 590, condemns the ones who “claim to their own private use the common gift of God.” And Symeon is still saying it in Constantinople in the eleventh century, five hundred years after Gregory and nine hundred after the Didache. Syria, Egypt, Italy, North Africa, Rome, Constantinople. A thousand-year span. Men who with vast theological disagreements, and on this they don’t blink.

Before you start clutching your toothbrush, none of this is condemning personal property. Basil and Ambrose still assume you own the coat before you hand it over. But, they take ownership and demote it from a right you hold to a job you can fail. The fundamental premise is that your stuff isn’t really your stuff, it is God’s stuff and possession of it comes with the obligation to steward it on behalf of everyone, and the moment you fail to do that, you are not a thief in waiting, you are already stealing. That’s Chrysostom’s whole point; Holding onto what you don’t need is not a missed chance to be nice, it’s robbery. You are like a servant who was given talents by his master, and you buried them. Yes, you read me right, that passage is not about investing in the stock market.

And look whose in this list. Cyril of Alexandria is not a gentle man. He’s the bishop who ran his rivals out of the city, the name church historians reach for when they want a case study in raw ecclesiastical power. If anyone had a motive to soften the teaching and keep his wealthy patrons comfortable, it was him. He says it too. Nobody is rich by nature, which means it is unnatural. When your most ruthless witness agrees with your kindest one, you’re not looking at a faction. Real lions laying down with the sheep type shit.

Hold onto that word, common, because the economy we live in today is built on the destruction of the commons.

2. Your surplus belongs to the poor, and keeping it is injustice.

“The bread which you hold back belongs to the hungry; the coat, which you guard in your locked storage-chests, belongs to the naked; the footwear moldering in your closet belongs to those without shoes. The silver that you keep hidden in a safe place belongs to the one in need. Thus, however many are those whom you could have provided for, so many are those whom you wrong.” — Basil of Caesarea, 4th c., Cappadocia

“When we furnish the destitute with any necessity we render to them what is their own, we do not bestow upon them what is ours; we pay the debt of justice rather than perform the works of mercy.” — Gregory the Great, c. 590, Rome

“The superfluities of the rich are the necessities of the poor. When you possess superfluities, you possess what belongs to others.” — Augustine of Hippo, early 5th c., North Africa

“But covetousness, like a tyrant, has intruded into life, so that its slaves and underlings have in various ways divided up that which the Master gave to be common to all. She has enclosed them by fences and made them secure by means of watchtowers, bolts and gates. She has deprived all other men of the enjoyment of the Master’s good gifts, shamelessly pretending to own them, contending that she has wronged no one. But this tyrant’s underlings and slaves in turn become, each one of them, evil slaves and keepers of the properties and monies entrusted to them. Even if they are moved by the threat of punishments… and take a few or even all of these things to give to those who are in poverty and distress whom they have hitherto ignored, how can they be accounted merciful? Have they fed Christ? Have they done a deed that is worthy of a reward? By no means! I tell you that they owe a debt of penitence to their dying day for all that they so long have kept back and deprived their brothers from using.” — Symeon the New Theologian, 11th c., Constantinople (Quote continued from the previous section.)

Notice the emphasis on justice and not simple charity. Charity is optional… you can skip it and still be righteous. Justice is a debt, and refusing to pay a debt makes you a criminal. So when Gregory calls almsgiving “the debt of justice rather than the works of mercy,” he’s not saying that the man sitting on his surplus while people starve is failing some personal spiritual goal of being generous. He is stealing the masters property from those the master created it for.

Even Augustine, one of the softest major voices the early church has on money, hands the poor a property claim. Augustine… the one most willing to let a Christian keep his wealth as long as their heart is right. The one capitalist christians quote when they want permission to be rich. The consensus on this spans the whole ideological range of the tradition, from Basil, who’s family freed their slaves and turned their estate into a common home, to Augustine at his most accommodating. Even the moderate tells you it’s not yours… give it back.

3. Letting a person die when you could have saved them is a kind of murder.

“Whoever has the ability to remedy the suffering of others, but chooses rather to withhold aid out of selfish motives, may properly be judged the equivalent of a murderer.” — Basil of Caesarea, 4th c., Cappadocia

"Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs." — John Chrysostom, 4th c., Antioch and Constantinople

Those who hoard “walk in the midst of the slaughter of their neighbours,” and “almost daily slay so many persons as there are dying poor whose subsidies they keep close in their own possession.” — Gregory the Great, c. 590, Rome

“Very many rich men are found whose taxes are murdering the poor.” — Salvian of Marseille, 5th c., Gaul

"In vain do they think themselves innocent who appropriate to their own use alone those goods which God gave in common; by not giving to others that which they themselves receive, they become homicides and murderers... they cause the death of as many persons as they might have fed and did not." — Gregory the Great, c. 590, Rome

YIKES! If this one sounds like a stretch you may be living in the imperial core. In reality it’s pretty straightforward. If the excess bread in your pantry rightly belongs to the starving person, and if you steal from them the thing they need to stay alive, and they die, you got explaining to do on the day of judgement. As Gregory the Great points out, if the goods are kept close in the hoarder's own possession while the poor die, and the killing happens quietly, at a distance it can provide the illusion of innocence. If nobody calls the cops and you never see the result of your injustice, your hands may appear clean. But, be not deceived. God is not mocked.

The murder language doesn’t really show up until the 4th century, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t congruent with the church’s teaching from earlier sources. For its first three hundred years the church was marginal, mostly powerless, and in no position to run an economy or to sit on the kind of concentrated wealth that could do real damage. Then came Constantine, and over the next century Christianity went from a persecuted sect to the official religion of the Roman Empire. Peter Brown, a leading historian of the period, pins the real turning point to around the year 370, when the rich started entering the church in serious numbers. This is when we see an explosion of Christian writing about wealth. The people now filling the pews were no longer only peasants, merchants and freedmen. They were senators and landowners. The wealthiest of the wealthy, who literally controlled the grain. Basil is not preaching “you are a murderer” to a room of poor fishermen who accidentally let a loaf of bread go stale. He is preaching it during an actual famine to actual Christian aristocrats who are actually holding grain off the market while people outside actually starve. Equating wealth accumulation with murder is not some extreme deviation from the church’s teaching. It’s just that now the people the teaching implicates have the ability to hoard on a scale that kills.

If you grant, as Matthew 25 suggests you must, that this teaching applies not only to the individual believer but to a whole society that calls itself Christian… a society run by Christians, who’s economy is shaped by Christians, then the stakes are no longer about personal piety, but about the death dealing economy Christians as a group are enforcing. A handful of poor believers sharing their bread is a beautiful private virtue and act of charity. But an entire Christian civilization who’s comfort is predicated on the kind of hoarding the fathers called murder is something else entirely.

4. Charging interest on a loan is a sin. No fair-rate loophole. No investment exception.

“God’s law forbids lending at interest to a brother... The law does not deem it right to collect interest on a loan. Instead, it commands lending freely to those in need.” — Clement of Alexandria, 2nd c., Alexandria

“Why do you scheme to make your idle money bear a return, and turn your brother’s poverty, the brother for whom Christ died, into the source of your enrichment?” — Hilary of Poitiers, 4th c., Gaul

“Because of the fecundity of the evil... As travail comes to the one giving birth, so the appointed day comes to the debtor. There is interest upon interest, the wicked offspring of wicked parents.” — Basil of Caesarea, 4th c., Cappadocia

The hoarder “is pregnant with a purse and begets usury out of desire for gain,” and the lender who fakes kindness “throws an anvil rather than a rope to one who is drowning.” — Gregory of Nyssa, 4th c., Cappadocia

"You shall not lend your money at interest, for it is written: 'He who has not put out his money at usury shall abide in the tabernacle of God.'" — Ambrose of Milan, 4th c., northern Italy

The fathers drew their confidence on this straight from Scripture. The Law forbids it (Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy), Psalm 15 blesses the man who won't lend at interest, Nehemiah rebukes the nobles for "exacting interest, each from his brother," Ezekiel files it beside robbery and idolatry, and Jesus raises the floor in Luke 6, "lend, expecting nothing in return."

And peep the lack of nuance. There is no “usury is bad when the rate is predatory” or “interest is fine for a productive investment.” Those are the exact carve-outs Christians today use to prop up the entire modern financial system, despite the fact that it doesn’t live up to them. The fathers yank the floor out from under all of that.

This wasn’t just a Roman Christian thing. In the 4th century off in the Persian empire, entirely outside Rome, Aphrahat told the members of his covenant that a serious Christian “should not demand interest when lending, nor should he love greed.” The condemnation reached the far eastern edge of the Christian map. In Cappadocia the brothers Gregory of Nyssa and Basil run the same grim joke, did you catch it in their quotes? The Greek word for interest, tokos, is also the word for childbirth, so they turn it into a monster… money getting money pregnant, a coin in labor to deliver more coins, an unnatural birth, while the man who borrowed to feed his kids is crushed under the offspring. Ambrose, over in the Latin West, makes it robbery and cannibalism at once, the lender consuming the borrower as surely as if he had mugged him in the street. Gregory of Nyssa’s other picture is colder still. The lender who dresses a loan up as a favor is throwing a drowning man an anvil.

The consensus didn’t die when Rome did. The early church believed this so strongly that it wasn’t just something they preached about, they made it law. The Council of Nicaea barred clergy from taking interest. From there it only widened in the fourth century and on down through the medieval councils, until the Council of Vienne in 1311 declared that merely defending usury as lawful was itself heresy. This lived in binding canon law, the official position of the Western church for roughly a thousand years.

And then the property line dissolves entirely.

Perhaps my favorite formulation of all of this culminates in the thirteenth century with Thomas Aquinas. He follows it to the end and states out loud the conclusion the four convictions are pointing toward… when a person is genuinely in need, the rich man’s right of ownership doesn’t just bend. It vanishes.

“In cases of need all things are common property, so that there would seem to be no sin in taking another’s property, for need has made it common.

Things which are of human right cannot derogate from natural right or Divine right. Now according to the natural order established by Divine Providence, inferior things are ordained for the purpose of succoring man’s needs by their means. Wherefore the division and appropriation of things which are based on human law, do not preclude the fact that man’s needs have to be remedied by means of these very things. Hence whatever certain people have in superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor.

For this reason Ambrose [Loc. cit., Article 2, Objection 3] says, and his words are embodied in the Decretals (Dist. xlvii, can. Sicut ii): “It is the hungry man’s bread that you withhold, the naked man’s cloak that you store away, the money that you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man’s ransom and freedom.”

If the need be so manifest and urgent, that it is evident that the present need must be remedied by whatever means be at hand (for instance when a person is in some imminent danger, and there is no other possible remedy), then it is lawful for a man to succor his own need by means of another’s property, by taking it either openly or secretly: nor is this properly speaking theft or robbery.”

It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another’s property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need.” — Thomas Aquinas, 13th c., Italy and Paris (Summa Theologiae)

He can be challenging to read so let me summarize it for you. God gave the earth to everyone. Private property is a secondary human arrangement laid on top of that fundamental one to facilitate the distribution of the common goods. So when the human arrangement collides with the divine purpose it was invented to serve, the human arrangement loses. As Aquinas said, the bread the starving man takes “becomes his own property by reason of that need.”

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Saints and Heretics

I told you before that the Christian consensus on wealth spanned not only centuries and continents, but also the theological divide. Around 410 an anonymous British Christian writing in Sicily, wrote a tract called On Riches. He sorted people into three groups, the rich, the poor, and the ones who have enough, and argued that poverty exists because wealth does. His solution was simple, get rid of the rich and you will find no more poor. Now, this writer ran in Pelagian circles, and Pelagianism got condemned as heresy. The church split with the Pelagians over how salvation works, not over whether the rich owed the poor. When the people you call heretics and the people you call saints agree, you’re not looking at a fringe position.

The Christian Alternative

The same church that preached against the destructive accumulation of wealth also built an extensive network of redistribution. It started with the Jerusalem church that held everything in common and made sure nobody among them went without, but this foretaste of Heavenly economics did not die in Jerusalem or fade with the first generation.

By the early 200s the church had paperwork for it. The documents scholars call church orders, the Didascalia out of Syria, and the sprawling Apostolic Constitutions, are almost entirely about organization, money, and discipline. How the offerings come in to the bishop. How the common fund gets gathered. How it gets handed out to widows, orphans, the sick, prisoners, the poor. You can dismiss a spontaneous miracle as a one-off Spirit-drunk moment. It’s much harder to dismiss a bureaucracy. Nobody writes standing procedures for a permanent redistribution fund unless they intend to keep doing it for a very long time. By the year 300 the romance of Acts had become something much less romantic and much harder to kill… a working welfare system, run by the church, from each according to their ability to each according to their need, in city after city across the empire.

So how well did it work? The best evidence actually comes from one of church’s enemies. In 362 the emperor Julian, the last pagan to hold the throne, was trying to kill Christianity by bringing back the old gods, and he was losing. “It is a disgrace”, he said writing to one of his pagan priests, “that the impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well,” while “all men see that our people lack aid from us.” He ordered his priests to build charity houses and copy the Christian habit of feeding strangers, because he could see it was winning converts faster than any argument. So yea, it sounds like the Christian economy was working so well he had to plagiarize it to compete.

I’m not going to sell you a golden age, because there wasn’t one. If the rich Christians had simply complied, there would be no need for six centuries of bishops escalating from “share” to “you are a murderer.” The vision and the failure lived in the same buildings, the same years, and sometimes the same sermon. Many Christians today, the kind that are slaves of two masters, will point to that as proof that all of this is a pipe dream. That we aren’t in heaven yet, so we have to be realistic and submit to the logic of a fallen world. But I guess what they say is true, the message of the cross really is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. The gospel, that is to say the proclamation that the powers and principalities of this world have been dethroned and that Christ is establishing his Kingdom on earth through his body, the church, is not invalidated by our failures to live up to it. Like it said in Acts 4, because of the witness of Christ’s resurrection great grace came upon them, and made it possible for them to embody Heaven’s economics on earth. Maybe what we need today is some of that great grace, though it might be hard to come by when the gospel the church preaches bears witness to the reign of the powers and principalities instead.

But some of them did take it seriously. Macrina, the older sister and teacher of Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, turned the family estate into a shared household, freed their slaves and made them equal members of the household. Olympias, an obscenely wealthy widow in Constantinople, got ordained a deaconess and poured her fortune into the church and the poor and built a monastery that grew to hundreds of women. And Melania the Younger, inherited one of the largest private fortunes in the Western empire, with an income of around a hundred and twenty thousand gold coins a year and land across at least eight provinces. She set out in her twenties to liquidate all of it and give it away. This of course was met with extreme prejudice. Roman aristocrats moved to block the sales and drive the prices down so the estates wouldn’t leave elite hands. Her own father opposed her. Her husband’s brother took her to court to stop her. The propertied class understood, correctly, that a fortune that size flowing out to the poor wasn’t a private devotion, it was a threat to the whole arrangement of who owns what, and they used the law to fight it.

By the end of the 500s, at the doorway of the medieval world, all of it was still standing. When Gregory the Great wrote his handbook for bishops around 590, the teaching hadn’t softened a degree. The church’s ban on lending at interest holds in canon law past the year 1300. Aquinas restates the whole thing in the 1200s and, as we saw, quotes Ambrose word for word to do it. So when I say consensus, I’m not describing a mood that passed through. This was something that held, in its essentials, for the better part of a thousand years before it broke. Which makes the descent into the unholy union of Christianity and capital at once so disheartening and confusing. Don’t worry, the next several essays in this series will be dedicated to figuring out how that happened.

The Pro Capital, Anti Christ Church

As I draw the first movement of this series to a close… yes, movement one had four parts and there are two more movements coming…I want to make clear that I am saying Christianity is incompatible with capitalism. Christians today, if they want to be faithful to Christ, must reject it as antithetical to their calling. The Scripture and the church’s faithful reading of and teaching on the Scripture bears witness to this. They did not have to say the word capitalism for this to be true. It would not exist for another thousand years. But we can safely assume someone would refuse to eat a baked good they had not conceived of yet if they have been clear that they refuse all of the ingredients used to bake it.

They said the earth is common and every title is an obligation to steward it for the use of others. Capitalism strips the condition off and makes ownership absolute, then drives it into everything, until the water and the seed and the land under your feet are all owned outright, held in fewer and fewer hands, and whatever cannot be fenced and sold is poisoned instead. The commons God gave to all get privatized in a totalized capacity and polluted.

Your surplus already belongs to the poor, they said, and keeping it is theft. Capitalism requires this theft, and requires you to compound it without end, because a firm that returns its surplus instead of reinvesting is a firm that dies.

Letting a man die you could have saved, they said, is a kind of murder. Capitalism turns that murder into a distribution method, creating artificial scarcity by rationing food, medicine, and shelter by who can pay instead of who needs, so that on a planet growing enough for everyone the granary stays locked by design.

And money must never breed money, they said. Capitalism makes breeding the entire purpose of money; the monstrous birth the Cappadocians recoiled from, the coin that that gives birth to coin, is now simply what a dollar is expected to do, what it must do.

Beneath all four convictions lies the appetite they named as the root of the rest, the hunger for more that knows no end. They called it a sickness of the soul to be healed. Capitalism installs it as a law, grow or die.

Capitalism is not just markets and trade, which are older than history. It is production organized to maximize profit, and you maximize profit by driving down the cost of the two things all production runs on, labor and resources. At home, in the imperial core, that squeeze has the potential to hit a wall… workers who will not be pushed past a point and land that will not yield past a point. Which means to continue to function Capitalism must reach outward for what it can no longer take at home, cheap labor and raw material from somewhere poorer, extracted on terms no domestic population would tolerate and held in place by either brute force, or soft power like USAID, the IMF, and the World Bank.

The comfort of the rich world, that many Christians think of as proof that capitalism works, is subsidized, right now, by that extraction, running into the trillions a year. Some would say that this is capitalism gone wrong and that we can fix it, but I believe it is capitalism grown up. Imperialism is not a stain on the model, it is the model, arriving where its logic must inevitably lead. Which is exactly where Jesus is standing, in Matthew 25, sorting the nations by what they did to the hungry, the naked, the sick, the prisoner, the least. A civilization that manufactures hunger, murder, and exploitation at that scale, along with every Christian involved in the project, is standing on the wrong side of that sorting.

When Decius told Christians around 250 to sacrifice to the Roman gods or die, a lot of them folded, and Cyprian of Carthage sat down to figure out why. His answer wasn’t fear, but money. Their wealth “had bound them with its chains… they were no longer free. Their money held them in chains… slaves of their profit.” Handed the choice between their estates and their God, they picked the estates. To Cyprian the rich Christian was a contradiction, a man attempting to walk uphill toward heaven refusing to cut loose the anchor around his neck. Todays Christians are not much different. Only they are more deceived. They have submitted themselves to the gods of empire while believing they are still servants of Christ. All the teachings of Christ evacuated of meaning and replaced with secular doctrine. Spiritualized away into oblivion. Convinced that there is no conflict in their submission to two masters. The anchor around their necks has been forged into the shaped of a cross.

I am not saying you’re damned for using money or holding a job in the only economy there is. You live here… so do I. You can live in Babylon. What you cannot do is call Babylon good or righteous. The Christian who does not merely endure this system but blesses it, who submits to its creeds, who evacuates the meaning of Scripture and replaces it with it’s opposite, is the one tying the anvil around their own neck. An economy does not just govern what we do, it forms what we are, and a life trained toward endless wanting and treating neighbors as instruments is a kind of moral injury, one that falls on believer and unbeliever alike.

Which leaves the one question this whole series exists to answer. If the faith and the system are this opposed, how did we get here? How did the church of Basil and Gregory become a church where the loudest Christian voices proclaim the not-so-good-news of the market as the nearest thing to the kingdom, where the logic of mammon gets read straight off the page as the logic of Christ? It did not happen by argument… there was no grand debate. It happened by a slow rewiring of the Christian imagination, a sequence of moves, each one reasonable-looking on its own, that taught believers to un-see what their own fathers saw in plain sight. More to come on that in the next installment.

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Primary sources (patristic and ancient)

Ambrose of Milan (c. 339–397)

• On Naboth (De Nabuthae) 12.53 — “You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor…” Anthologized in Charles Avila, Ownership: Early Christian Teaching (Sheed & Ward / Orbis, 1983); trans. also in Boniface Ramsey, Ambrose (Routledge, 1997).

• On Tobias (De Tobia) — his treatise against usury (the “consuming the borrower” material, paraphrased in the essay). Trans. Lois Miles Zucker, S. Ambrosii De Tobia (Catholic University of America Patristic Studies 35, 1933).

• Letter 19 (to Vigilius) — “You shall not lend your money at interest…”

• On the Duties of the Clergy (De Officiis) — NPNF, 2nd ser., vol. 10.

Aphrahat, the Persian Sage (c. 270–345)

• The Demonstration on the Sons of the Covenant (”let him not lend at interest, and let him not love avarice”), and Demonstration 20 (”On the Support of the Needy”). Trans. Adam Lehto, The Demonstrations of Aphrahat, the Persian Sage (Gorgias Press, 2010). [Cite the covenant demonstration by name; confirm its number against Lehto’s contents — likely Dem. 6, not 8.]

Augustine of Hippo (354–430)

• Expositions of the Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos) 147.12 — “The superfluities of the rich are the necessities of the poor.” Trans. Maria Boulding, WSA (New City Press); also NPNF, 1st ser., vol. 8.

Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–379)

• Homily 6, “I Will Tear Down My Barns” (on Luke 12:18); “In Time of Famine and Drought”; and “Against Those Who Lend at Interest” (his homily on Psalm 14/15). All in C. Paul Schroeder, trans., St. Basil the Great: On Social Justice (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009).

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215)

• Christ the Educator (Paedagogus) 2.13 — “the use should be common.” Stromateis (Miscellanies) 2.18 — on lending at interest. ANF, vol. 2.

Cyprian of Carthage (c. 200–258)

• On the Lapsed (De Lapsis) 12 — “their money held them in chains… slaves of their profit.” ANF, vol. 5.

Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444)

• Commentary on Luke, Sermon 109 — “it is no man’s own by right of nature that he is rich.” Trans. R. Payne Smith (1859).

Didache (c. 100)

• 4:8 — “share everything with your brother and call nothing your own.” Trans. in Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers (Baker Academic).

Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395)

• Against Those Who Practice Usury (Contra Usurarios) — “pregnant with a purse… begets usury”; “an anvil rather than a rope.” Trans. Casimir McCambley, Greek Orthodox Theological Review.

Gregory the Great (c. 540–604)

• The Book of Pastoral Rule (Regula Pastoralis) III.21 — “the debt of justice rather than the works of mercy”; “the common gift of God”; and the “slaughter of their neighbours” passage. NPNF, 2nd ser., vol. 12; and Henry Davis, trans., ACW 11. [The blunter “homicides and murderers” wording used in the essay is an older alternate translation, not the NPNF rendering; if you keep it, cite the Latin (PL 77, col. 87) beside it, or switch to the NPNF wording.]

Hilary of Poitiers (c. 310–367)

• Homilies on the Psalms (Tractatus super Psalmos) 14.15 — “the brother for whom Christ died.”

Jerome (c. 342–420)

• Letter 120 (to Hedybia), c. 406–407 — the “mammon of iniquity” proverb, “either a rich man is unjust or he has inherited from an unjust man.”

John Chrysostom (c. 347–407)

• Sermons on the Rich Man and Lazarus, Sermon 2.5 — “a robbery of the poor, and a depriving them of their livelihood” and “to steal from them and deprive them of life” are two English renderings of the same passage (the second is the wording in the Catechism of the Catholic Church §2446), not two separate statements. Trans. Catharine P. Roth, St. John Chrysostom: On Wealth and Poverty (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984).

Julian (”the Apostate”) (331–363)

• Letter to Arsacius (Letter 22) — “the impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well.” Trans. Wilmer Cave Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian, vol. 3 (Loeb Classical Library, 1923).

Justin Martyr (c. 100–165)

• First Apology 14 — “bring what we have into a common stock.” ANF, vol. 1.

Lactantius (c. 250–325)

• Divine Institutes V.5 — “gave the earth in common to all… not that mad and raging avarice might claim all things for itself.” ANF, vol. 7.

Anonymous, On Riches (De Divitiis) (c. 410, Pelagian circle)

• “Get rid of the rich and you will find no more poor.” Trans. B. R. Rees, The Letters of Pelagius and His Followers (Boydell, 1991).

Salvian of Marseille (c. 400–490)

• On the Government of God (De Gubernatione Dei), Book IV — “very many rich men are found whose taxes are murdering the poor.” Trans. Eva M. Sanford (Columbia University Press, 1930).

Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022)

• The Discourses — “common to all, like the light and this air that we breathe”; “covetousness, like a tyrant, has intruded into life.” Trans. C. J. de Catanzaro, Symeon the New Theologian: The Discourses, Classics of Western Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1980). [Confirm the discourse number against de Catanzaro before printing: our verification placed it at Discourse 9; other citations give Discourse 35 (~p. 359) or the Ethical Discourses. Open the edition and check which discourse this passage sits in.]

Tertullian (c. 155–220)

• Apology 39 — “One in mind and soul, we do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another. All things are common among us but our wives.” Trans. S. Thelwall, ANF, vol. 3.

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)

• Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 66, a. 7 (theft in cases of need), which itself quotes Ambrose via the Decretum Gratiani, Dist. 47. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province.

Sources for the biographical figures

• Macrina — Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina.

• Olympias — Palladius, Lausiac History; and the anonymous Life of Olympias.

• Melania the Younger — Gerontius, Life of Melania the Younger (trans. Elizabeth A. Clark, Edwin Mellen, 1984).

Church orders

• Apostolic Tradition — traditionally attributed to Hippolytus, but its authorship, provenance, and date are disputed; many scholars regard it as a composite text developed over time.

• Didascalia Apostolorum (Syria, 3rd c.)

• Apostolic Constitutions (c. 380)

Councils and canon law

• First Council of Nicaea (325), canon 17 — clergy forbidden to take interest.

• Council of Vienne (1311) — anyone who pertinaciously maintains that usury is not sinful is to be punished as a heretic.

• Decretum Gratiani (Dist. 47), cited via Aquinas.

Scripture cited

• Exodus 22:25; Leviticus 25:35–37; Deuteronomy 23:19–20 (the usury laws)

• Psalm 15:5

• Nehemiah 5:7

• Ezekiel 18

• Matthew 6:24 (two masters); Matthew 25:14–30 (the talents); Matthew 25:31–46 (the sheep and the goats)

• Luke 6:34–35

• Acts 2:44–45; 4:32–35 (the Jerusalem community)

• 1 Corinthians 1:18

• Galatians 6:7

Secondary source

• Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton University Press, 2012).

Thanks for reading Kensington Koan. If you like what you read, or hate it enough to want to keep tabs on me, please consider subscribing to get my new posts sent directly to you. They are all free for the first 6 weeks. After that the full archive is available to paid subscribers. If you became a paid subscriber, it would really help me to keep producing this work. If you really want access and $8 a month is just too much right now (trust me I’ve been there most of my adult life), send me a direct message and we will work something out. <3

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Hit dogs sure do holler.

A favorite dismissal of the cretinous demagogues intent on harming their LGBTQ+ siblings by any means possibl…

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This is Part 3 of an ongoing series called The Future of Christianity is Communionist. If you’re reading this for the first time, start with Part 1, which lays the theological foundation everything else builds on. Part 2 established what Jesus actually taught about wealth and why he connected it so directly to salvation. This installment asks what the people closest to that teaching did with it.

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Picture a group of people who just watched their leader get executed by the state, come back from the dead, and then vanish into the sky promising to return. Or at least a community who believed those things happened. Now, try to picture what they might have done next.

They sold their stuff and shared the money with any member who had need. From each according to their ability to each according to their need.

As a child I could quote Acts1:1 th…

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Before anything else: thank you. You’re reading this because you partner with me, and I don’t treat that lightly. Every essay I get to publish, every person one of these pieces reaches, happens because you decided this work was worth sustaining. That isn’t a transaction to me. It’s the thing that makes the work exist at all.

The public essay this week made an argument I believe. It also left a few doors open that I closed quietly, or didn’t close at all, because a public piece has to move and a 4,000-word argument can only carry so many qualifications before it stops being readable and starts being a giant footnote. This is often the case in my work. So I am going to make a regular habit of giving you, my partners, a peak behind that curtain that consists of editorial notes and exposing loose threads. Please let me know if you like this. At the bottom of this post is something new I discovered that gives you the chance to get your paid subscription for free some months, check it out.

Th…

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A brief note before we begin: I know I’m in the middle of a series on Christian attitudes toward wealth, economy, and the Kingdom of God. I’ll be returning to that next week. But this piece interrupted me during Pride Month, and after working on it, I decided it shouldn’t stay behind the paywall. Thank you to paid subscribers who read it first and make it possible for me to spend this kind of time chasing down these threads.

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It’s pride month. Which means, if your feed is anything like mine, you’ve been seeing a lot of content debating the legitimacy of all things LGBTQ+. Most of the fight happens at the level of proof texts. What did Paul mean in Romans 1, what did Leviticus actually prohibit, did any Church Father ever bless something that…

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This week I am taking a short break from my series on the history of Christian attitudes, teachings, and practices on wealth, economy and the Kingdom of God to address a potential critique that no one has actually brought up. I’m neurotic like that.

Last week I talked about the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. A rich man ignores a beggar at his gate. They both die. The beggar ends up at Abraham’s side, the rich man wakes up in torment, and when he begs for a single drop of water Abraham tells him “between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.”

The parable is excellent in its instruction. The wealthy do not possess their wealth, but are possessed by it to such a degree that even the triumph of the Resurrection is not enough t…

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Thanks for reading Kensington Koan. If you like what you read, or hate it enough to want to keep tabs on me, please consider subscribing to get my new posts sent directly to you. They are all free for the first 6 weeks. After that the full archive is available to paid subscribers. If you became a paid subscriber, it would really help me to keep producing this work. If you really want access and $8 a month is just too much right now (trust me I’ve been there most of my adult life), send me a direct message and we will work something out. <3

If you want to check out any of the books I recommend in my content, consider purchasing them through my Bookshop.org store instead of Amazon. You can choose a local bookstore to support with your purchase and help support my content as well.
https://bookshop.org/shop/coltenbarnaby

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Thanks for reading Kensington Koan. If you like what you read, or hate it enough to want to keep tabs on me, please consider subscribing to get my new posts sent directly to you. They are all free for the first 6 weeks. After that the full archive is available to paid subscribers. If you became a paid subscriber, it would really help me to keep producing this work. If you really want access and $8 a month is just too much right now (trust me I’ve been there most of my adult life), send me a direct message and we will work something out. <3

If you want to check out any of the books I recommend in my content, consider purchasing them through my Bookshop.org store instead of Amazon. You can choose a local bookstore to support with your purchase and help support my content as well.
https://bookshop.org/shop/coltenbarnaby

It was nearly midnight, and I sat motionless at my desk, eyes fixed blankly on my screen, confronted again by the same relentless thought: I've spent more than a decade waiting. For what exactly? I’d been waiting to achieve some nebulous standard of financial security, intellectual credibility, or worthiness… an imagined threshold after which my voice might finally matter. But that night, I finally glimpsed the truth: the perfect moment never arrives. You have to act anyway, inside the moments you have, however imperfect they may be.

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Earlier that day, my therapist had recommended Albert Camus’s "The Myth of Sisyphus." I took his advice and quickly found myself shaken awake by Camus’s sharp clarity. He writes about the absurd condition of human existence: our endless quest for meaning within an indifferent and silent universe. According to Camus, real freedom arises not by escaping life's absurdity through illusions or despair but by passionately embracing it, rebelling by making meaning anyway.

In the Greek myth, Sisyphus is eternally condemned to push a boulder uphill, only to see it roll back down, endlessly repeating the cycle. Yet Camus insists we must "imagine Sisyphus happy." His happiness lies precisely in his conscious rebellion, his acceptance of futility without hope of divine intervention. Sisyphus becomes free because he creates meaning in the very act of his endless struggle. Camus admonishes us, do not attempt to escape the absurd, confront it.

Jean-Paul Sartre vividly illustrates the stakes of Camus’s warning in The Age of Reason, portraying the existential consequences of a life spent waiting

“I have led a toothless life,” he thought. “A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone. What’s to be done?…”

“A life,” Sartre writes, “is formed from the future just like the bodies are compounded from the void.” Mathieu, the protagonist, bends his head in remorse, realizing with devastating clarity that his present self, “weary and a little over-ripe,” was precisely the future his younger self once hopefully anticipated. The youthful promises, “I will be free,” “I will be famous”, now haunted him, their insistence cutting sharply across the years. He is, at times, “visited by attacks of devastating remorse”, as the full weight of his inaction collapses in on him, exposing how thoroughly he had betrayed his own vision of the future.

These lines pierced me. Sartre captures the bitter truth of existential procrastination, the dull ache of recognizing your current self as the disappointing future your younger self unwittingly created by perpetually deferring authentic living. Langston Hughes evokes a similar existential pain in "Harlem":

"What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?... Or does it explode?"

For years, I’d quietly felt this despair. Growing up within evangelical Christianity, my early life was steeped in a promise of escape from absurdity through divine intervention, the Rapture, deliverance from earthly despair. When that spiritual hope faded, I replaced it with something more grounded, more socially acceptable: the pursuit of financial independence. It felt responsible, even virtuous, a way to secure my future, to buy back time, to live on my own terms. And there's nothing wrong with building security. But in hindsight, I can see that it wasn’t freedom I was chasing, but another form of escape. I wasn’t confronting absurdity or the material struggle of life; I was trying to outmaneuver them.

When that too failed to deliver the clarity or meaning I was grasping for, suicidal ideation became a twisted replacement, an imagined escape from the crushing absurdity of existence. I didn't truly desire death, but I envied its imagined freedom from the struggle.

This dark recognition surfaced clearly for the first time when a close friend took his own life. Amid collective grief, I felt a terrifying envy, a twisted jealousy toward the finality of his escape. It disturbed and frightened me, but it was undeniably real.

The brutal honesty of Camus and Sartre offered me a lifeline out of that quiet despair. Not by restoring false hope, but by extinguishing it altogether. Proverbs 13:12 says plainly, "Hope deferred makes the heart sick." I now realize that my heart was sickened not just by disappointment, but by the very act of passive hoping itself. I had become trapped waiting for external salvation, a financial windfall, societal validation, or some divine rescue…before I let myself actually live.

This Substack is a part of my rebellion. It's my conscious rejection of passive hope and existential procrastination. It's me biting decisively into life, despite the absurdity. But existential freedom isn't personal alone. Today, those who relentlessly accumulate wealth and power wield agency without ethical constraint. Meanwhile, those of us who actually care about justice or solidarity keep hesitating, keep waiting to be invited, keep waiting for the moment to feel right.

Perhaps our hesitation is precisely why the world tilts toward exploitation rather than solidarity.

The odds are stacked against justice, truth, and equality. Our revolts, personal or collective, offer no guarantee of victory. But maybe existential rebellion isn’t about success. Maybe it’s about acting authentically, passionately, even desperately, precisely because no promise of victory exists, and because waiting passively ensures defeat.

And maybe, in order to face the enormity of that struggle, without illusions, without guarantees, we first have to confront the absurd in ourselves. Perhaps the courage to fight for material freedom, for collective liberation, can only emerge from the kind of existential freedom Camus describes: the refusal to look away, to wait, to hope for rescue. The refusal to live anyone else’s meaning but your own.1

I cannot experience your freedom, only my own. But I can tell you this: the alternative to existential revolt, a life lived waiting for permission, is unbearable. So here I am, doing my best to reject false hope, embrace absurdity, and choose authenticity, knowing fully there are no guarantees.

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A Note to You

This is my first post for paid subscribers only. I plan to do at least one of these per month. So if you are reading this you are one of the 36 people who have given me the gift of your financial support. I cannot tell you how much it means to me. After I was let go from my church job in 2013 I applied for jobs at 23 churches and the closest I got was getting down to the final two for a young adults pastor role. When I asked what I could do to be a better candidate the consultant in charge of the hiring process for that church told me I should consider gaining 70lbs or losing 70lbs because I was fat but not fat enough to look confident in being fat. (Seriously, he said that. lol) The people I did ministry with for 6 years didn’t want me and neither did anyone else. I didn’t have anything to say or offer of value to anyone. At least that was the twisted message my mind and body absorbed. I was left with $180,000 in student loan debt for two degrees in Historical Theological Studies. (Well, one degree. I had to drop out of my master’s program with only my thesis defense left to complete after being let go.) I got a job in car sales and muted myself on matters of theology and politics in the public sphere for the next 13 years. So when I started writing on Substack last year at the recommendation of my therapist I never imagined anybody but my close friends, who subscribed out of love for me, would be interested in what I wrote here. But here you are. And I am humbled by your support and grateful for each of you.

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Every Good Friday I come back to this story and feel the same thing. Not grief for the death of Christ or reverence, but something closer to frustration. And if I’m honest, sometimes maybe even a little contempt.

I don’t want to feel contempt. That feels wrong, and I’ve sat with it long enough to know the feeling doesn’t fully settle into anything clean. But the frustration is real, and I’m not interested in writing around it.

When I read the account the account of Pilate, Jesus and Barrabas, especially as told in Luke, I identify more with the people in the crowd shouting “Crucify Him! Give us Barrabas” then I do with the people mourning Jesus.

I do not believe the crowd that chose Barabbas over Jesus was irrational. They were not spiritually blind in some way that the reader, safe and distant from Roman occupation, is not. They were people living under one of the most brutal governors Rome ever posted to Judea. Bart Ehrman, one of the most prominent New Testament scholars alive, describes Pilate as a man who used soldiers as thugs, ruled with total contempt for the people beneath him, and had no concern whatsoever for their welfare or their opinion of him. These were not people with the luxury of metaphysics. They needed someone that would fight for them.

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