Reclaiming the Radical Economic Message of Luke

David D. M. King

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781666733396, 9781666728002
• eBook ISBN: 9781666728019
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Bibelkritik & -auslegung

No canonical Gospel is more concerned with wealth and poverty than Luke. A centuries-long debate rages over just how revolutionary Luke's message is. This book seeks to recover Luke's radical economic message, to place it in its ancient context, and to tease out its prophetic implications for today. Luke has a radical message of good news for the poor and resistance to wealth. God is shown to favor the poor, championing their struggle for justice while condemning the rich and recommending a sweeping disposal of wealth for the benefit of the poor. This represents a distinct break from the ethics of the Roman Empire and a profound challenge to modern economic systems. Generations of interpreters have worked to file down Luke's sharp edges, from scribes copying ancient manuscripts, to early Christian authors, to contemporary scholars. Such domestication disfigures the gospel, silencing its critique of an economic system whose unremitting drive for profit and economic growth continues to widen the gap between rich and poor while threatening life-altering, environmental change. It is time to reclaim the bracing, prophetic call of Luke's economic message that warns against the destructive power of wealth and insists on justice for the poor and marginalized.

Chapter 1

Introduction

None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

—Luke 14:33 NRSV

Shortly before his assassination, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. focused his work on a Poor People’s Campaign.

The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.1

These are radical words demanding sweeping changes in society for the benefit of the poor. But when King’s holiday rolls around every January, it is not these words that are quoted. It is not even the words from the beginning of his famous speech from the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963:

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.2

No, it is not these words. The words we hear each year are always the same: “I have a dream.” All of Dr. King’s work gets boiled down to those four words. And in that distillation, the radical King is lost and forgotten. The radical King is so completely lost that critics of the Black Lives Matter movement can suggest that BLM should tone things down, be less in-your-face, just like, they say, Dr. King kept things calm and reasonable, not remembering that King was remarkably controversial and unpopular during his lifetime.3

As often happens in history, however, time cools political passions, and leaders once damned as radicals or traitors—and King was frequently called both—are absorbed into a patriotic narrative that stresses consensus rather than conflict. Abstracted from the specific circumstances of their history, they come to function as symbols of the nation as a whole.4

As the story of Dr. King is passed down again and again, he is made less revolutionary, less radical, and more respectable. In the end, he is seen as an idealist who just wants everyone to get along instead of a crusader for justice and for real, material change.

Nevertheless, the King of American civil religion is a highly selective version of King the historical actor. This is why conservatives can commemorate King with as much sincerity as liberals. Judging people “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” is entirely consistent with the individualism that provides the ideological underpinning of American capitalism. Conveniently forgotten is the man who berated America for its excessive materialism and militarism, who stated qualified admiration for Karl Marx and who regarded Sweden’s social democracy as a model that the United States of America would do well to follow.5

Phillip Esler notes a similar process of domestication in the reception of the economic themes in the Gospel of Luke and its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles.

The ingrained disregard among scholars for the social and economic setting of Luke-Acts, and their corresponding enthusiasm . . . for its alleged spiritual and individualistic approach to salvation, originate in a clear middle-class bias. Generations of scholars, in their seminaries and universities, have been so successful in making Luke’s message on possessions palatable for bourgeois tastes that its genuinely radical nature has rarely been noted.6

The rough edges of Luke’s economic message are sanded down with each new interpretation. Every time that the radical elements are ignored or explained away, it becomes that much easier for interpreters and believers to harmonize Luke with the prevailing economic practices of the culture.

Luke has long been known for having more material concerning wealth and poverty than any other gospel. In light of this, many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the theology of poor and rich found in Luke or in Luke-Acts, notably the following: Luke Timothy Johnson, Walter Pilgrim, David Peter Seccombe, Kyoung-Jin Kim, Thomas E. Phillips, James A. Metzger, and Christopher M. Hays.7 As Johnson summarizes, “The problem we face is that although Luke consistently talks about possessions, he does not talk about possessions consistently.”8 Most commonly, this inconsistency is identified as the presence in Luke-Acts of calls both (1) to total renunciation or communal property and (2) to mere almsgiving.9 Are all disciples required to renounce possessions? Who exactly is required to renounce, and how much are they r...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: A New Accounting
• Chapter 3: Luke’s Clear Message of Liberation
• Chapter 4: Challenges to Liberation
• Chapter 5: Roman Economic Domination and Luke’s Radical Alternative
• Chapter 6: Lukan Accommodation to Roman Economic Domination
• Chapter 7: Modern Mammonism
• Chapter 8: Reclaiming the Radical
• Chapter 9: Conclusion
• Bibliography