Can You Be Too Rich for Heaven?

Yet the Christian perspective must be far more holistic, pushing beyond corporate and governmental structures to the dispositions of individual people towards wealth and towards the financial, environmental, educational, legal, and social needs of the poor.

Should I buy a new, high-definition TV? Is universal healthcare a right? Should I expand my business? From what manufacturers should I buy my clothing? From the Christian perspective, every aspect of stewardship--time, talents, and money--should carry a concern to restore socio-economic injustice. Fortunately, Christians today not only benefit from the voices of current leaders but also may take advantage of the wisdom of those Christians who in earlier times wrestled with many of these same questions. Early Christianity provides us with a wealth of resources to retrain our minds to think Christianly about wealth, poverty, and the desire to resolve economic disparities.

Case in point: In Mark 10:21 (and the parallel text in Luke 18:22), Jesus told a rich young man that he needed to "sell all that he possessed" in order to be one of his followers. This was as jarring to the early Christian readers as it sounds to us today. Was Jesus suggesting that a person can be too rich for heaven? Early Christians were divided about the question before a consensus emerged around a critique of superfluous wealth.

The natural reading of Mark 10:21 is that Jesus called for a lifestyle of renunciation, that is to say, a disavowal both of wealth and of one's access to wealth. During the second century, some Christian writings taught as much. The Epistle of Barnabas, for example, exhorted its readers, "Treat as common all things with your neighbor, and do not say things are 'one's own,' for if you are sharers in incorruptible things, how much more ought you to be sharers in corruptible things!" The command not to call things "one's own" is also found in Didache 4.8, a late first-or second-century document, although it is less clear in Didache that the author held strictly to a renunciation view.

Even in the second century, however, the matter was the subject of some debate. In Against Heresies, Irenaeus of Lyons accepted that property is morally neutral. Property itself is not to blame; rather, one's use of property should be scrutinized. In fact, the possession of property is not a right, since everything one currently has is the result of someone else's earlier labor. 

Thus, the property one acquires is always to be used for a morally good purpose. Irenaeus recalled how the Israelites took wealth from the Egyptians just prior to their exodus (cf. Ex 12:35), only later redeeming it when they used it to build their temple. "And we are proved to be righteous by whatsoever else we do well, redeeming, as it were, our property from strange hands." The implication of this argument for later Christians was that, just because you labored in a field for a planting and harvesting season, you do not have the right to declare that all that is harvested from the field is your own. All property is the result of someone else's earlier labor. Someone in an earlier time acquired the raw materials. People in earlier times designed the tools used in harvesting or tradecrafts. Land and any rain that falls upon it are a divine gift and not the product of human labor. Thus, property could never really be considered "private" because no one person could ever claim to have produced every part of it!

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Source: Brian Matz, ChristianHistory.net