Comments on: What God Has To Say About Money Part One: Debt

By: Nicole

Nicole — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 00:55:00 +0000

There is a difference between debt and obligations. You can have obligations like your house note, car note and the like. Your obligations become debt when you can no longer make the payment.

God’s Word is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. So if he said in Deuteronomy 28:12 that we should not be borrowers but lenders, the same apply to us where ever we are in 2007.

By: Suni

Suni — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:59:00 +0000

I can see how you would say that debt can become our god. It is hard to get out from under it once you start getting into it. It’s also very hard NOT to have debt in the world that we live in. It’s almost impossible to live in this world and not have debt. Not everyone can buy a house outright. It’s a shame, really. I am going to take from this that we shouldn’t let debt run our lives. That is something that we should remember every day. Thanks you for writing this.

By: boomer

boomer — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 15:09:00 +0000

If the previous commentor believed what he/she wrote, he/she wouldn’t have signed ‘anonymous’. Makes you wonder. Hmmmmm?

Of course there were ‘lenders’ during Jesus’s time. If you actually read the Bible, you would have known that. Debt is not a powerful tool, as anonymous states. When you are in debt, you are a slave to the lender. The pilgrims didn’t come to this country on debt. In the beginning history of America, immigrants would not be permitted to America unless they had actual hard, cold cash in their pockets.
Times have changed. And for the worse, I might add. America has gone from a land of citizens to a land of consumers. We are building a life on sand, not rock. And we all know what happens to a house built on sand?
All the people (and bloggers) I know, who are financially secure, all (and I mean ALL) have a strong Christian backbone. Life back then during the times of the bible is no more different than it is today. Just because you carry a cellphone doesn’t change the laws of good and evil.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 15:54:00 +0000

It’s a matter of opinion that “God speaks” in the Bible, you know. Lots of Christians don’t believe that it’s literally true. Before you start taking financial advice from an ancient religious text, you should look into the context of the statements in there. At the time, debt was frowned upon much more than it is today, but this isn’t because debt was “evil” or anything like that. It’s because humanity had not yet developed sophisticated ways of managing money and debt and the societal systems that help to ensure that debt obligations are entered into fairly (with everyone knowing the terms from the beginning). Jesus and other religious people probably frowned on debt because back then “debt” usually meant borrowing from friends, family, etc, and such borrowing often strains or destroys these relationships (even today).

There were no corporate megabanks at the time the Bible was written. So you can’t fairly apply the financial advice in the Bible to our current situation. People simply weren’t aware of how powerful a tool debt truly is to improve society for everyone. The entire Western world was built by debt; arguably, it was even more instrumental than religion in building our society. Efficient systems of debt allow us to amortize costs of big projects across many years and many people…and thus allow us to finance the construction of projects that would have been beyond the grasp of humanity at the time the Bible was written.

For another counterpoint, look at the Islamic world. They have been shackled in their application of debt because they have much stronger prohibitions against debt than the Christian or Jewish holy texts do. Partly as a consequence of this, their societies have remained impoverished and unable to develop as rapidly as the West did. Technically, even things like interest-bearing bank accounts are a form of debt (the only difference is that you are the lender and the bank is the debtor). Under strict Islamic interpretations (or some of the more radical Christian interpretations) these accounts should be prohibited. Surely you can see that bank accounts do a lot of good for society, right? But they are “debt”, so they are “wrong” if you believe ancient religious texts literally.

Look, I know that religion is very important to a lot of people. I’m not meaning to attack your religious beliefs. I’m just questioning whether religion is a good source of financial advice, given its poor track record on this matter. You need to understand that things like the Bible contain wisdom of humanity from a moment frozen in time several thousand years ago. The texts don’t evolve, so they don’t incorporate things we have learned to do better since then.