This flies in the face of the Capitalistic business of investment banking and ursury practices that were also condemned in the Old Testament on numerous occasions (i.e. "If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an creditor, neither shalt thou lay upon him interest" -Ex 22:25)
The Old Testament usury laws, like most of Old Testament law after to coming of Christ, have little relevance to us today, and have never been taught or reattached to the restored gospel by the Lord's servants in our day. If you, like Nibley, want to carefully extract from the Old Testament laws as current among a tribal, nomadic people 2,500 years ago in the ancient Near East, specific doctrines/cultural practices useful to your interpretational frame and graft your cherry picked favorite Old Testament prohibitions, taboos, and economic structures upon the modern Church, you are involved in a classic fundamentalist-like endeavor of projecting ancient religious concepts ahead thousands of years as if the gospel itself was a closed system of rules, social stigmas, and ritualized prohibitions that was intended to "stay put" for all time.
Both the New Testament and the restored gospel sweep all of this away by making clear that the Law of Moses was a "schoolmaster," to prepare Israel for the true Messiah. The New and Everlasting Covenant fulfills and obviates the need for the vast majority of Mosaic religious forms, including many of its social and economic laws.
If you really believe loaning money at interest (the most morally neutral behavior, in and of itself, I can think of, economically, save for paying for the use of any other kind of property transferred through an uncoerced contractual relationship from one person to another) is evil, than perhaps try finding some other argument for it than transporting, Nibley-like, selected Old Testament laws into the present and dropping them in our laps as if the gospel itself hadn't moved on from animal sacrifice and stoning someone for slapping his father.
He did far more than simply "encourage" them to concentrate on spiritual wealth; he explicitly commanded them to give up their worldly possessions to benefit those in need.
Yes, he did, but this semantic exercise grows wearying. There is no teaching regarding the "abolishing" of either poverty or private property in the New Testament. There is giving, there is sacrifice, and there is "giving up." There is not a utopian scheme of human redemption through politics based on economics as the focus of human salvation.
This again flies in the face of everything the modern-day Capitialist stands for. In their minds, the poor in America aren't even really poor, as we're told that by comparison to those in third-world countries, they're essentially rich.
1. There is no such thing as a "capitalist" in the sense of a definite class designation of people who hold certain beliefs and perspectives. That idea has no real world existence outside of academic Marxism and the activist's soapbox.
2. Also true of the poor, in America at least, and other similar advanced, free market, open societies. Only a small core of the "underclass" is relentlessly trapped in lifelong, intergenerational poverty such that they represent permanent stratification within American culture. But their plight is a result, not of "capitalism," but because of the culture and incentives created by the welfare state, which culture many of them support and lionize, and which many in the middle classes parrot as "transgressive."
We're also told that the only reason the poor are poor, is because they choose to be. I don't see anything in Christ's teachings supporting these kinds of judgments and rationalizations.
Probably because this is flaming strawman. "Choose to be" is fundamentally correct, of course, but needs a bit of polishing and definition.
Oh? Giving up one's worldly possessions wasn't required in order to obtain salvation?
No. Only the ability, or faith in Christ required for such a feat is mandated. Job lost all he had, and gained back many times that after he had successfully passed his ordeals. That some individuals may be so required, I'm not arguing. That literally giving up all one's worldly possessions is a requirement of salvation puts you over on the Indian subcontinent, Kevin, not in the New Testament.
In fact, his followers who owned worldly property did so with the understanding that it wasn't really theirs to begin with.
So do I. I acknowledge such each and every time I pay tithing.
Everything belonged to God and Christ's followers were to give everything they had so it could be distributed evenly amongs those within the community, each according to his need.
No such term, or concept, is taught in the New Testament. You're wild extrapolations here are getting a bit extreme, as time goes on.
While the goal of social equality is frequently ridiculed as communistic and evil among some Right Wingers, Jesus and his disciples felt it was a goal worth striving for:
"All that believed were together, and had all things in common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need." (Acts 2:44-45)
If you could provide me a single verse of scripture, anywhere, that indicates a teaching of "social equality" among Jesus or his disciples, please feel free to post the CFR. The above is the same, threadbare prooftext that has been used unendingly - and debunked equally as often - to prove ancient "Christian socialism."
As has been pointed out endlessly, "having all things is common" is not a literal egalitarian condition but a covenant relationship. Further, the social conditions under which that particular pooling of resources took place is unknown and not recoverable in the scriptures we have. It occurs once, in Acts, but never again, indicating to me that it was probably (like say, the Teton dam disaster, or the Indonesian tsunami) a time of deep sacrifice among the saints for other saints in dire need.
What it does not appear to be is a general mandate for all saints for all time in matters economic.
Is it possible that Marx’s famous line “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” took its inspiration directly from the New Testament?
Marx may have done so, but I don't know off hand. In any case, Marx' dictum is deeply problemmatic for any Christian, not to mention LDS, because at the root of it lies the assumption that all of us who work, toil, create, and produce, are essentially the permanent indentured servants of those who do not. This is a serious problem, from both a gospel and free, rule of law based society perspective, because it fundamentally alters the gospel and New Testament relationship between those with wealth and the poor from one of love/service to one of preemptive claim/forced provision of that claim by a third party.
Nothing could be further from Christ than Marx, just as nothing could be further from coerced redistribution of private property than true charity.
As far as the Right Wing's whipping boy (taxes), Jesus seemed to take a very different approach to this subject, essentially instructing his followers to give whatever the state authorities asked of them, simply because all they wanted was worldly money, which apparently had no value to those seeking the Kingdom of Heaven:
Then Kevin, I invite you and David Bokovoy to follow your own counsel here. I await your report, for I will be very interested in hearing your description of life without money or personal property.
"Is it lawful for us to pay taxes to the emperor, or not? But he perceived their craftiness and said to them, 'Show me a denarius. Whose head and whose title does it bear?'They said, 'The emperor's.' He said to them, 'Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's.' And they were not able in the presence of the peopel to trap him by what he said; and being amazed by his answer, they became silent." (Luke 20:21-26.NRSV)
I think it rather obvious that all the Lord was saying here is what the Church has always taught:
We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.
You notice, of course, that Christ mentions nothing about the kind, nature, scope, or degree of taxation. In fact, as with all of this dance around the Maypole, he develops no doctrine of theory of political economy whatsoever here. None.
In that "section"? Rev 3:16 is precisely the verse I quoted. The "lukewarm" reference comes from that verse and it applies specifically to a Rich man who Christ calls "miserable and wretched." His sin was his pride in his wealth I agree, but the wealth itself is evil because it brings out the pride.
Go far enough into the mind of any serious leftist and you will invariably find exactly this condescending, social determinist concept of the human being as a passive repository of social, economic, and material forces beyond his control and outside the intellectual and moral perimeters of his own agency.
Possession of money causes greed and pride, just as guns and other weapons cause crime, rules and laws create criminals, different perspectives and beliefs create "divisiveness," and any differences in competence, success and achievement - in anything - cause social inequality.
The only reason anyone would seek excessive wealth is pride and vanity.
I can think of a number of righteous and justifiable reasons to seek wealth ("excessive" you should define, so we know what you mean by it).
Christ's answer? Avoid private property altogether.
No, that is Buddha's answer and the answer of the Vedic based religions, not Christ. All you're doing is rewriting the Bible in your own image, just like the doctors of the Church in the early centuries after the apostles, only here, instead of the doctrine of the Trinity, we have liberty, fraternity, and equality.
Droopy:
but here again, wealth itself, wealth creation, affluence, and economic abundance are never criticized (or mentioned), only materialism is on the chopping block here, and its children greed, avarice, selfishness, covetousness and envy, this last being the emotional and psychological basis of socialism
You do not understand socialism then.
Yes, I do, which is why you and people like you fear and hate people like me so much.
Envy has nothing to do with Socialism.
It's the psychological basis and animating principle of it. The theory is simply a massive rationalization of ressentiment as a perspective.
Socialism is a system designed to serve those who actually work and produce goods and services, and it is designed to include everyone in society. This is why poverty cannot exist in a true socialistic society, and it is precisely why Christ's Church felt it necessary to design a system that prevented the kind of inequality that permeates in modern capitalistic systems. Inequality was viewed as an evil driven by man's desire for worldly wealth.
This sounds like the stuff I used to listen to on Radio Havana back in the eighties in Maryland on my shortwave radio.
This has gone too long, but I've made the points I wanted to make thus far. I can't spend all night on this rather extended series of posts.