My friend, Rob Dillon, a devoted and disciplined Christian, is an evolutionary biologist, a college professor who studies snails, surely one of life’s more practical endeavors.
I once asked Rob, “If one of your secular humanist science professor colleagues, who respects you as a scientist, were to ask you, ‘Why are you a Christian?’–how would you answer him?” To which Rob–who hardly worships at the altar of conventional wisdom–he replied, “I’d tell him I wish I weren’t.”
What do you suppose Dr. Dillon meant by that?
Might he have been referring to how authentic Christian faith challenges most of how most of us most often define our lives, primarily in terms of our particular self-interest and material circumstances? Rob’s response: was it, after all, genuinely humble and honest enough to at least acknowledge a preference for being primarily self-centered, as well as materially defined? The former being, in essence, a “do it to the other guy before he can do it to you” approach; when, if you will, “the end justifies the means.” With the latter’s emphasis espousing “the more the better,” as when “enough never is.”
Not that there isn’t an abundance of popular religion these days that–despite its fraudulant protest otherwise–doesn’t, in fact, promote just such a counterfeit Christianity, perhaps even more implicitly than explicitly. For indeed, if my dad was right, when he used to instruct me that faithful Christian living, at least–how it involves “being in the world (materially, socially, politically), but not of it”–what I’ve discovered, over the years (not, apparently, unlike Dr. Dillon), is just how morally and spiritually seductive that “in the world” part of the paradox can be: the call to “unconditional” living (what Christians call “grace”), compared to all the demanding “conditions” in most of our lives that tend to be so defining (commonly referred to as “works righteousness”); when “letting go” and “trusting” may be even harder than “striving” and “grasping”; when a “gift” gets confused with an “accomplishment.”
Hence, “A Wealth Problem?” That is, at least, how Jesus says it in the Gospels of the Christian New Testament. Contrary to what is promoted so incessantly in our culture–too often, I’m afraid, even “at church”–that “wealth” is hardly a “problem”; how it is, rather, “poverty.” As, for example, where even in “affluent America,” while a fifth of the population control nearly 85% of all wealth, the lower two-fifths possess but a mere .3% of such resources (Paul Solomon, “The PBS News Hour”). Except when you read the Bible–where Jesus, at least–where he seems to suggest a tragic connection between “material prosperity” and moral and spiritual “poverty.”
And since Jesus speaks to this matter more than anything else–the “wealth problem”–I could cite an abundance of scripture verses that support such a thesis. However, most of us, I suspect–we would prefer reading whatever the Bible might have to say about almost anything else.
I will, nonetheless, mention two familiar references. For even Paul clarifies that it isn’t “money,” but rather the “love of [it] that is the root of all evil” (I Timothy 6: 10). And granted, when Jesus instructs a wealthy but well-meaning lawyer (in each of the first three Gospels) to liquidate all of his assets and give the proceeds to the poor–that is, of course, a hyperbole. It’s not a literal statement; its purpose is, rather, one of emphasis. Not unlike yet another of Jesus’ similarly startling sayings (in Luke 14) about “hating” your parents.
It’s that emphasis, however, that persists in exposing the difference between whatever it is we may “own” (or think we do) that can so easily end up “owning us.” Enough, perhaps, for the likes of a Rob Dillon–when asked, ‘Why are you a Christian?’–to reply, “I wish I weren’t.”
