Devil’s Advocate

In the film, Devil’s Advocate (1997), human free-will plays a very important role. It has implications not only for whether humans tend to be good or evil, but also on how culpable God is for the evil that committed by humans. One of the devil’s sons by a mortal woman, Kevin Lomax, must choose whether or not to impregnate his half-sister, Christabella Andreoli, to produce the Anti-Christ, which John Milton, who is the devil, wants so much. In Christian theology, both the extent of free-will and how tainted it is from the Fall have been debated. Even within Augustine’s works, his thought changes. The one thing that cannot be asserted is that free-will both does and does not exist. Also, that so many greedy people have been so destructive of democracies and even the planet does not necessarily mean that God is responsible or that humans are not capable of choosing to do good over evil.

The full essay is at "Devil's Advocate."

The Count of Monte Cristo: On Vengeance and Forgiveness

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” is a Biblical saying that is perhaps as well known as it is typically ignored in the midst of passion. Even the advice that revenge is better served up as a cold dish rather than immediately when the grill is still hot is difficult to heed. The 1975 film, The Count of Monte-Cristo, can be likened to a “how-to” recipe book on how to exact revenge against multiple people, one after the other until the sense dawns on the avenger that one’s one life has been utterly consumed by the desire and then feels empty once the deserved suffering has been sufficiently inflicted. It is admittedly very difficult to walk away from a grievous injustice if the agent of the harm is allowed to evade suffering that is deserved. In the film, however, Abbé Faria, a Christian priest who has been unjustly held in an island prison for fifteen years, nonetheless urges Edmond Dantes, whose prison cell is connected to Faria’s tunnel, to resist the temptation to ruin the lives of the four men who had unjustly imprisoned Edmund, including De Villefort, Danglars, and General Fernand Mondego. In the end, Dantes, as the Count of Monte-Crisco, pays dearly for having gone down the road of vengeance. Even if the suffering inflicted on the unjust is deserved ethically, distinctly religious implications should be considered lest avengers are left existentially empty rather than as one might expect, finally at peace. The Christian notion of the Kingdom of God is prominent in this distinctly religious regard.

The full essay is at "The Count of Monte Cristo." 

Pope Leo: Poised against Plutocracy?

Poised as the “new Leonine era,” worded as if gilding the proverbial lily as if a golden ring, the installation of Pope Leo XIV reinvigorated Pope Francis’s preachments on the poor and economic inequality because Robert Prevost chose Leo in large part because of Pope Leo XIII of the late nineteenth century, whose “historic encyclical Rerum Novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.”[1] Due to “his choice of pontifical name and his mathematical and legal training, Pope Leo XIV has awakened hope and curiosity among the faithful and the more secular world about the influence the Catholic Church could exert on the economic world during his pontificate.”[2] In the exuberance of a new pontificate, it is easy to get carried away with excitement as to possibilities. Amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s crime against humanity in Gaza, no one could be blamed for seeking out hope wherever it could be found. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind just how marginal the calls of conscience can be, given the onslaught of greed not only in the present day represented by powerful corporate (and related) governmental interests, but also in greed’s institutional accretions built up over time that have a force of their own in protecting the economic (and political) status quo.

The practical impact of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, promulgated in 1891, should not be overstated. To be sure, it “laid the foundations of the social doctrine of the Church that inspired Catholic trade unionism, and, some 30 years later, the creation of the Christian Democratic parties that contributed decisively to the civil and material reconstruction of Europe after World War II.”[3] Calling “for workers’ rights without resorting to the class struggle promoted by Marxist doctrine” by instead focusing on “the balance of fair wages and equal economic relations,” Rerum Novarum can be said to have been prudent and eminently practical.[4] Even so, a focus on microeconomics can only do so much when the macro political-economy structure is left intact, and that structure, specifically in its huge concentrations of private capital in modern corporations and their economic-turned-political power in the halls of government amid elected representatives seeking campaign-reelection donations and lucrative jobs in the future, plays a crucial role in perpetuating and even aggravating huge economic disparities and the corruption of democracy by plutocracy.

“Pope Leo XIII questioned the concentrations of economic industrial power and was immediately attacked,” says Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, a banker and former president of the Institute for Religious Works, the corrupt Vatican financial institution.[5] Tedeschi attributed the anti-trust legislation in the United States to the encyclical, but he left out the ensuing fecklessness with which the U.S. Justice Department has used the Sherman Act to break up oligopolies and monopolies (e.g., Facebook, Amazon, General Motors, etc) undoubtedly because of “political pressure.” Even though the Sherman Act was passed “to curb the power of cartels that had created a near-monopoly regime with serious social repercussions” does not mean that much curbing actually took place.[6] Because “serious social repercussions” stem from anti-competitive economic industries, the staying power of the latter even decades into the twenty-first century means that even prior efforts to fortify labor unions fell short of the aims of Rerum Novarum. The proof, in order words, is in the pudding.

That Pope Leo XIV sought to build on established Catholic social teaching such as Rerum Novarum “to respond to another industrial revolution and to developments in artificial intelligence that bring new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and work” may have been putting the cart before the horse, given the social repercussions still occurring in 2025 from the gigantic economic and political power of the mega multinational corporations.[7] Indeed, “economic data” showed “growing crises and imbalances between average incomes and the cost of living” in the E.U. and U.S., which a focus on AI would not address.[8]

In the U.S., the pope’s home country, for example, the federal House of Representatives was in the midst of cutting the budget of Medicaid, which funds healthcare for the poor and disabled. Just days before the inaugural Mass of the new pope, a group of conservative Republican lawmakers blocked a bill with cuts to the program because they were not large enough, given the president’s proposed tax-cut (amid a federal budget debt at the time of $36.21 trillion). That any tax cut would even be proposed amid such a debt (with Moody’s recently having reduced the U.S.’s credit rating) defies fiscal logic and prudence. Cutting health-care for the poor without cutting military spending conjures up “social repercussions” in terms of values that presumably violate those of Rerum Novarum and thus Popes Leo XIII and XIV.

I submit that the Roman Catholic Church still had work to do on the question of human dignity, well-being, and justice in the context of human nature’s incompatibility with holding so much economic and political power in such concentrations that human nature itself may be warped as in the case of an addiction. The incarnation of billionaires who could not possibly spend such wealth in their respective lifetimes (and their survival from want is virtually assured) is something that Pope Leo XIII could not have dealt with, as businessmen such as JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were the millionaire “titans” of the Gilded Age. Having broken up Standard Oil in 1913 (without changing the ownership) does not mean much as the U.S. Justice Department stood by through the rest of the twentieth century as more and more American industries turned into oligopolies and even de facto monopolies. The practical impact of Rerum Novarum hardly justifies moving on the AI without taking another stab at the political-economic regime that has perpetuated and even extenuated massive economic inequality and price-setting “inflation” by companies.

Just days before Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate officially began, Walmart’s chief financial manager told the media that the company “had no choice” in raising prices due to new tariffs. Were Walmart’s industry competitive rather than oligopolistic, Walmart would be a price-taker, such that market discipline (i.e., choices by consumers) could mean that Walmart would “have no choice” but to accept lower profit by absorbing some of the supply-cost increases rather than passing them all on to the consumers. As U.S. President Trump said, Walmart had made billions of dollars in 2024, and thus could afford to absorb some of the impact of the tariffs. Put another way, we have no choice but pass on the increases onto the consumer is itself not only a lie, but also an indication of the company’s perception of its industry as less than subject to competitive forces wherein consumers can vote with their wallets and purses by buying elsewhere rather than being forced to pay more at Walmart.

If anything, the economic (and related political) regime that supports excessive economic rents being paid by consumers as large corporations continue to profit greatly has endured and even prospered as the status quo since Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891. Oligopolies came to populate even the high-tech industry, including social media, at the expense of competitive markets and thus consumers as well as workers. Restructuring the underlying political-economic regime lies beyond the purview of labor unions; even the voice of Catholic conscience may be insufficient, given how the regime is fed by and feeds greed. In shifting from a strict anti-wealth paradigm to a pro-wealth paradigm wherein wealth is decoupled from greed (i.e., liberality and munificence vindicating even fortunes as camels slip through narrow places), Christianity had arguably compromised itself with respect to being a normative obstacle to greed.[9]

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1. Sergio Cantone, “How the Pontificate of Pope Leo XIV Could Influence the World Economy,” Euronews.com, May 18, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. See Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth, available at Amazon.

Hindu Dharmic Leadership

At Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025, Ed Anobah spoke on dharma (right-acting) leadership as a means of making progress in solving societal problems using Hinduism’s spiritual tradition of bhukti (devotionalism).  Anobah based his talk on the book, Leadership for an Age of Higher Consciousness by D. T. Swami. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna says that what great people do, other people follow. What constitutes healthy, impactful leadership? The ideal leader in Hinduism is also a great sage, like Plato’s notion of a philosopher king. Leadership that deals wholistically with the human condition by exemplifies the character of a leader, which does not mean that only highly educated persons can or should be leaders. Rather, “everyone is a leader,” potentially, and “we are all leading our own life.” Each of us is a leader potentially for other people on the interpersonal level. Each of us can inspire other people. Anobah claimed that certain universal principles of leadership can apply across the board. I submit that this view is vulnerable to being too utopian when it is applied in the business world. Being realistic as to possible practical difficulties and even limitations in applying dharmic leadership in business (and government) is advisable. Even there being different metaphysical assumptions can get in the way, practically speaking, as compassionate leadership runs up against the profit-motive in business. 

The full essay is at "Hindu Dharmic Leadership." 

On Embodied Souls in Business: Hinduism and Christianity

A man whose chosen Hindu name is Vridavanath spoke at Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025 on the plight and ultimate aim of an embodied soul as described in the Bhagavad-Gita. A conditioned soul/self (atman) that has entered the material realm and is thus subject to karmic consequences can come back to the divine source of all: the One that is in all. As material, embodied beings while alive, that is, as both biological and spiritual, we are prone to getting locked into dualities of attachment and aversion, which in turn play right into suffering. We forget that we are wearing material masks, and that our real identity (atman) is greater than our material roles that we assume in our daily lives. Through our actions, we bind ourselves by the law of karma. Before being born into the material realm, a person’s unembodied soul (atman) knew Krishna, but as embodied, the soul/self relates to other corporeal bodies rather than to other people as spiritual beings and thus in compassion. Why does Brahman or Krishna—the respective impersonal or personal notions of Absolute Truth—create the world with separateness from the divine included?  Furthermore, how is a devotee of Krishna to navigate working in business, given the separateness woven into the very fabric of our daily existence as material and spiritual beings?

Body, soul, and matter are the three fundamental elements in the created realm. Fundamentally, we are free beings but we are subject to attachments in the created realm. Honoring the free will of the soul, Brahman or Krishna creates separateness in Creation; it is not that conscious being or the supreme deity wants us to be in a condition of separation from the divine. Rather, the embodied soul is guided in part out of its inclination to live separately from the divine, and Brahman or Krishna use creative energy to accommodate the inclination and thus human free-will. It follows that not only goodness, but also passion and ignorance are the fundamental elements of the soul’s material (embodied) existence in the material world.

As the Supreme Soul, according to Vridavanath, Krishna leads embodied souls to goodness even though Krishna (and Brahman) transcends goodness. Similarly, liberation (moksha) is achieved when there is no longer any residue from good and bad karma. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard makes the same point: that the divine command that Abraham gets to sacrifice his son Isaac trumps the ethical verdict of murder (and even attempted murder, as Abraham is commanded by Yahweh to put down his knife at the last minute). From the standpoint of the (ethical) good, Abraham is guilty of attempted murder. Yet from a theological standpoint, the divine command is to sacrifice rather than murder Isaac. This can only be viewed as absurd to other characters in the story, for they do not have access to the divine command that is given exclusively to Abraham. The ultimate goal in a faith narrative is theological rather than ethical, for such a narrative lies squarely in the sui generis domain of religion, even if that of ethics is related.

In his talk, Vridavanath said that the ultimate goal of the embodied soul/self in the Bhagavad-Gita is to know Krishna, by using the faculty of buddhi, which is the enlightened use of the reasoning faculty of the mind to know the source of the created realm. However, does knowledge exhaust devotion? It seems that the former is better suited to Absolute Truth being impersonal than to it being assumed to be personal, as a Supreme Person. In the Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna, "Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you sacrifice, whatever you give, whatever austerities-you-perform—do that . . . (as) an offering to Me. Thus you will be freed from the bonds of action (whose) fruits are auspicious (or) inauspicious. Released, (with) the self-yoked by the Yoga of renunciation, you will come to Me."[1] The goal thus surpasses good as well as bad karma, and thus ethics, as the world itself must be renounced in terms of being attached to it for a person to be liberated. This does not mean non-action, according to the Gita; rather, renunciation means non-attachment to consequences of actions. The embodied soul/self is to do one’s duty in actions without being concerned about the results. Krishna also advocates meditation, as well as bhakti-yoga, the path of offering love by infusing each activity with love of Krishna and all creatures.

The inclusion of "whatever you give" includes offering in devotion to Krishna the fruits of one's labor (i.e., monetary compensation) yet without being attached to the consequences of our actions, including whether there will be a monetary bonus. Rather than desiring wealth, being duty-bound to perform one’s job and giving of one’s compensation to charity in devotion to Krishna and compassion to other people is the way to avoid accumulating bad karma from being greedy and ultimately to return to Krishna, and thus be liberated from any future rebirth (samsara).

The approach corresponds to the Christian social-ethic paradigm whose dominance replaced that of the one wherein having wealth is tightly coupled to greed, regardless of how the wealth is used.[1] That other paradigm is epitomized by Jesus’s saying that a rich person getting into the kingdom of God is like a camel getting through the eye of a needle (I have trouble even putting a thread through a needle’s eye). 

In the Gita, a devotee of Krishna can and in fact should fight in battle, and by implication, be a highly paid CEO of a company, but without being attached to the resulting fame and wealth, respectively. As in the “pro-wealth” (i.e., uncoupled) paradigm of Christianity, a devotee of Krishna does not have to renounce accumulating wealth, as long as at least some of it is given away in charity, in order to avoid serving two masters—Krishna and mammon. That Christian paradigm is, however, less strict because the Jesus-devotee does not have to be detached from the consequences of one’s work, including the prospect of getting a bonus. 

I submit, therefore, that the Christian “pro-wealth” paradigm is more suspectable to the onslaught of greed. This may be why Jesus in the Gospels is firm in demanding that the rich man give away all of his wealth to follow Jesus. It can be concluded that the susceptibility to succumb to greed is treated as higher in the “pro-wealth” Christian paradigm that in the Bhagavad-Gita.

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1. Gita 9.27-28 in Georg and Brenda Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), p. 199.
2. Skip Worden, Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit and Wealth and God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth.

The Hebrew Bible on Wealth

The early Hebrews considered wealth to be an integral part of human perfection and, moreover, what ought to be.[1] The ideal man was wealthy and leisured, and yet occupied with honorable work.[2] In the Torah, as long as the Hebrews as a people obey God, including dutifully acting as stewards rather than as selfish exploiters of the land that God has provided, poverty should be nonexistent in Israel. “There need be no poor people among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the Lord your God.”[3] Blessed wealth is a reward for fidelity to Yahweh, whereas poverty here is indicative of, or even punishment for, disobedience, which will evidently always be the case in Israel, for, “There will always be poor people in the land.”[4] The conditionality leaps off the page, as does the notion of collective justice, and yet wealthy individuals, including business practitioners, are held to account. The ethic of work is upheld even though labor in Genesis is due to original sin.  

The Torah does recognize, however, that the humble can be poor and the greedy and prideful can become rich. God does not punish the humble and reward the proud. To be proud is to trust in oneself, and thus one’s own ability to acquire still more. In Psalm 52, the righteous laugh at the man, “who did not make God his stronghold, but trusted in his great wealth and grew strong by destroying others!”[5] Such strength refers here to becoming richer or more powerful, rather than more righteous or pleasing in the sight of the Lord.

The Hebrew Bible depicts greed as a sin. For one thing, greed can motivate a rich or powerful person to unjustly exploit the poor to obtain still more wealth. Relatedly, moreover, putting the love of gain above loving and obeying God implicates greed in contributing to the more grave sin of idolatry—regarding or treating something in Creation as being above the Creator, and thus as a superior god. Pride is thus in the mix—the arrogance of a pot to presume itself superior to the potter who made it. Generally speaking, the Hebrew Bible tends to associate the rich with being greedy, prideful, and, worst of all, idolatrous. Prideful idolatry involves trusting in oneself rather than God. This sort of pride goes easily with making money into an idol to form the ground of existence. The prophets had nothing good to say about selfish wealth and leisure.[6] This does not necessarily implicate wealth itself, however, or even being rich, since it can be a reward for being obedient in placing Yahweh before oneself and other possible gods, such as wooden idols and even earthly treasure. In the Torah, greed and wealth are uncoupled, as if snipped apart with scissors. Wealth itself can go either way. Riches acquired righteously are a blessing from God and therefore do not carry the stain of greed, whereas wealth gained greedily, as in taking unjustly from the poor, is associated with sin.

Nobody is exempt from being tempted by greed. Referring to the people of Jerusalem, Jeremiah charges, “From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain.”[7] As an urge, greed can be understood as coming out of an instinct that is activated along with the subtle sense, or fear, that having enough for the future can never be guaranteed completely. It is as if we were squirrels continuously scurrying around after walnuts, storing as many as possible until none more can be found. No amount of wealth is sufficient to get a person to certainty on whether what one now has is sufficient for one’s future needs and comfort. Accordingly, having just clinched a good deal is never enough; any brief satisfaction at the achievement is quickly replaced by the urge to get an even better deal.

Just because greed is a sin does not mean that it treats all wealth as sinful too. According to the Hebrew Bible, a person need not be wealthy in order to be greedy, and a person can be rich without being greedy. Every prophet preached that if Israel were righteous, it would be sure to prosper—the gift of Jehovah on condition that Israel kept to the covenant (i.e., righteousness).[8] The prophets denounce the abuse of wealth rather than seeking or holding wealth itself, luxury, commerce or even monopoly as evil in itself. [9] Even if the overwhelming majority of rich Hebrews in Jerusalem were at a certain time very greedy in unjustly exploiting the poor to gain still more wealth, the Torah indicates that God could still bestow riches, which, coming as a blessing, would be unstained by the sin of greed. Each of the three Patriarchs in Genesis, for example, is rich.[10] Were greed mixed in with blessed wealth, God would be rewarding the righteous with a sin, which does not make sense. Abraham’s wealth is a gift from God rather than a sin.[11]

As a gift, blessed wealth can come with or without the need to labor for it. Proverb 10 promises, “The blessing of the LORD brings wealth, without painful toil for it.”[12] Blessed wealth gained without effort is reminiscent of the natural wealth of the Golden Age depicted by Greco-Roman poets such as Homer and Ovid.[13] The Greco-Roman poets characterize such wealth as being free of greed; where there is plenty and no fear of future shortage, a person need not labor; one can even let go of the instinct for still more without fear of falling short one day. In the Hebrew Bible, blessed wealth without painful toil is associated with not only a lack of greed, but also the Garden of Eden—hence prior to Adam’s original sin. It follows that blessed wealth without labor is more of a reward than is the variety of blessed wealth in which industriousness is required. 

The Hebrew Bible does not insist that industriousness itself is sinful. Proverb 10 states, “Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth. He who gathers crops in summer is a prudent son, but he who sleeps during harvest is a disgraceful son. The wealth of the rich is their fortified city, but poverty is the ruin of the poor.”[14] Therefore, working diligently does not necessarily mean that a person is greedy. “Those who work their land will have abundant food, but those who chase fantasies will have their fill of poverty.”[15] Ceaseless activity does not necessarily point to the presence of greed. Proverb 18 goes so far as to say, “One who is slack in his work is brother to one who destroys.”[16] Industriousness does not suffer from the vice of such sloth.

Industriousness is not unconditionally good, however. The virtue must pertain to the person who works rightly as a steward in the vineyard in which God created the soil, the vine, the fruit, and even the laborer. Proverb 22 declares, “Rich and poor have this in common: The LORD is the Maker of them all.”[17] Although the vineyard differs from the Garden of Eden (or the poets’ Golden Age) in that painful toil is necessary, profit-taking from industrious labor is a blessing, or reward, that God bestows on the stewards who have been dutifully industrious in managing God’s property.  The blessed wealth and the industriousness being presumed greed-free are therefore conditioned on how a person responds to God.

With God as “Possessor of heaven and earth,” the world is the Creator’s property in Genesis.[18] It follows that human possessions are gifts from God. Rather than becoming the absolute owner of the gifted property, the Hebrew is meant to act as God’s steward.[19] That is, God retains the basic or foundational ownership right in His property. Moreover, the property relations embody a relation between Israel and God in which the Israelites owe obedience and service as stewards in exchange for a right to Jehovah’s blessings, which include riches.[20]  Put another way, because Jehovah is a partner in every Hebrew’s property, no Israelite was able “do as he liked with his own.”[21] Indeed, one’s own is precisely what is being qualified or restrained here. At most, a Hebrew’s property was his own and God’s, if not altogether God’s.[22] The partnership laid out in Scripture is one of rights and responsibilities rather than “anything goes,” as is the case with greed.

The theological value of maintaining the partnership through dutiful work and blessed wealth should not be overstated, however. Even though the bounty from God’s vineyard is free of greed, the riches cannot be expected to accomplish what righteousness can do. According to Proverb 22, “A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold.”[23] Proverb 11 is more direct. “Wealth is worthless in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death.”[24] Through Zephaniah, God says of the sinners, “Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to save them on the day of the LORD’s wrath.”[25] Clearly, having wealth is not as valuable as being righteous.

If riches bestowed by God are worthless in making up for unrighteousness, it goes without saying that greed-laden wealth surely cannot accomplish what righteousness can. “Ill-gotten treasures have no lasting value, but righteousness delivers from death.”[26] When greed is added to the equation, industriousness and its wages become ruinous. Proverbs warns, “Better the poor whose walk is blameless than the rich whose ways are perverse.”[27] In other words, even though we are all subject to the temptation to subject our diligent labor to greed, the sour odor need not stain the fabric of one’s work clothes or the fruit of one’s labor. “The wages of the righteous is life, but the earnings of the wicked are sin and death.”[28] The greedy, having acquired their wealth unjustly, will lose it. The Book of Enoch, of the ancient Jewish apocalyptic movement, reads, “Woe to you who acquire silver and gold in unrighteousness and say: ‘We have become rich with riches and have possessions; (a)nd have acquired everything we have desired.’ . . . your riches shall not abide . . . For ye have acquired it all in unrighteousness, (a)nd ye shall be given over to a great curse.”[29] Both in respect to wealth falling far short of righteousness and the very conditionality of blessed wealth, the positive theological significance of wealth is lessened, or at least moderated. Neither the conditionality of the positive theological significance nor the tendency of people to succumb to greed is a trivial point in the Hebrew Bible.

For more on Judaism on profit-seeking and wealth, see Skip Worden, God’s Gold, ch. 2.

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[1]. Charles R. Smith, The Bible Doctrine of Wealth and Work (London: Epworth Press, 1924), 21.

[2]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 22, 33-34.

[3]. Deut. 15:4-5.

[4]. Deut. 15:11.

[5]. Ps. 52:6-7. All Biblical passages quoted in this chapter are according to the New International Version of the Bible, obtained from BibleGateway.com.

[6]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 111.

[7]. Jer. 8:10.

[8]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 128.

[9]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 97-99.

[10]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 21.

[11]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 24; Gen. 24:35.

[12]. Prov. 10:22.

[13]. See Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth, ch. 1.

[14]. Prov. 10:4,5,15.

[15]. Prov. 28:19.

[16]. Prov. 18:9.

[17]. Prov. 22:2

[18]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 23; Genesis 14:19,22.

[19]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 25.

[20]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 26,55.

[21]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 54-55.

[22]. Smith, The Bible Doctrine, 55.

[23]. Prov. 22:1.

[24]. Prov. 11:4.

[25]. Zeph. 1:18.

[26]. Prov. 10:2

[27]. Prov. 28:6. According to Flusser, the Book of Enoch, of the ancient Jewish apocalyptic movement, contrasts woes against the wicked rich with word of hope and promise to the righteous poor. David Flusser, “Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit,” Israel Exploration Journal, 10 no. 1 (1960): 12.

[28]. Prov. 10:16.

[29]. Book of Enoch, bk 5, 97:8,10. Quote from Robert H. Charles, The Ethiopic Version of the Book of Enoch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906.

Pope Francis on Subordinating Greed and Wealth

The documentary, Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (2018) chiefly lays out the pope’s critique of economic Man. The film begins with references to climate change too loosely linked to the global population figure of 8 million humans, 1 billion of whom are unnecessarily living in poverty. The viewer is left to fill in the gaps, such as that because as biological organisms we must consume and use energy, the hyperextended overpopulation of the species is the root cause of climate- and ecosystem-changing CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans. Arguably, the salvific Son of God or the means into the Kingdom of God enjoy pride of place in the gospels, but compassion for the poor as well as outcasts and the sick is indeed a message that Jesus stresses in the faith narratives. Rather than being a sign of sin, poverty, especially if voluntary,  can permit the sort of humility that is much superior to the pride of the Pharisees. In the documentary, Jorge Bergoglio, who took the name Francis in becoming pope of the Roman Catholic Church in 2013, is a practical man who points to the sickness or temptation of greed that keeps humanity from riding itself of poverty, unnecessarily. Moreover, the hegemony of the market, with its culture of consumerism and commoditization, comes at the cost of the common good, which to Francis has a spiritual basis. Abstractly speaking, harmony, which inherently respects its own limitations, should have priority over greed and markets. Both of these can go to excess without enough built-in constraints as occurred before and during the financial crisis of 2008, with poverty plaguing humanity more rather than less as a result.

The full essay is at "Pope Francis."

Film in Biblical Storytelling

For anyone interested in filmmaking, a film that features the internal operations of a film studio—especially one during the “Golden Age” of Hollywood—is likely to be captivating. After all, as Eddie Mannix, the studio executive in Hail, Caesar! (2016), says, the “vast masses of humanity look to pictures for information and uplift and, yes, entertainment.” This film provides all three for its audience on what film-making was like in the studio system. With regards to the Christian theology, however, the result is mixed.  The film makes the point that theological information best comes out indirectly from dramatic dialogue rather than discussion on theology itself. In other words, inserting a theological lecture into a film’s narrative is less effective than an impassioned speech by which entertainment and uplift can carry the information.

The full essay is at "Hail, Caesar!"

Financial Scandal in the Vatican: A Historical Perspective on Christian Economic Ethics

In the history of Christian economic thought, theologians, with the exception of Clement of Alexandria, interpreted the biblical story of the rich man who refuses to part with his wealth in order to follow Jesus as meaning that having wealth is itself indicative of the presence of the underlying sin of greed. The dominance of this anti-wealth paradigm only began to give way during the Commercial Revolution in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the expansion of trading made it possible for ordinary people to save, and thus hold wealth without any sense of an underlying sin. Hence, Aquinas differed from Aristotle in allowing for moderate profit without the assumption of any underlying greed. In the Renaissance, theologians generally agreed that the Christian virtues of liberality and munificence could justify even being rich. Even Cosimo de Medici, who made his fortune from the sin of usury (i.e., interest on loans), gained the approval of the Pope in Rome by donating a fraction of the fortune to the Church. Under the dominance of the pro-wealth paradigm, Christians could be wealthy without being assumed to be greedy.[1] As for the Church itself being able to hold wealth, the collective wealth, gained from donations and selling goods, of monasteries in the Middle Ages was the door-opener. It was not as if a greedy individual could be said to exist if a religious organization owned the wealth. Aquinas approved of such wealth, a stance that, with his approval of moderate profit earned (and held as wealth) by individual Christians, began the shift that would result in the hegemony of the pro-wealth paradigm.[2] Unlike individual Christians holding coin without being presumed greedy, monasteries owning substantial wealth could be subject to a critique based on Jesus’ objection to money-changers in the Temple. When I visited a convent in Tucson, Arizona once, a sister rebuffed my request to pick a couple of oranges from the trees behind the building. “We make juice that we sell,” she replied. I had the impression that I had witnessed greed over charity in a religious vocation. Such hypocrisy, enabled by the allowance for collective monastic wealth, rivals Pope Eugene IV’s absolution of Cosimo de Medici, in spite of his fortune having been gained entirely from usury, because he renovated a monastery in Florence. This historical background can help us situate the Vatican’s financial scandal that culminated in five Vatican officials being suspended in 2019.

The scandal centered “on a large building in Chelsea [an upscale area of London] that was co-owned by the Vatican and an Italian business partner, London-based financier Raffaele Mincione,” who said “that the Chelsea investment had been highly profitable for the Vatican, which he said bought out his share [in 2018]. Mr. Mincione said the Vatican had invested a total of €320 million ($353 million), including the assumption of a €130 million mortgage, but that the building, at 60 Sloane Avenue, [was] worth €390 million” in 2019.[3] Complaints from the Vatican Bank itself and the office of the Vatican’s auditor general led Vatican investigators to raid and seize documents and electronic devices “from the offices of the Vatican’s powerful executive, the Secretariat of State, as well as the Vatican financial watchdog that monitors the long scandal-plagued Vatican Bank.”[4] The scandal was thus hardly the first for the Church’s bank. Even the Vatican’s financial watchdog had become culpable. The suspended employees “include Tommaso Di Ruzza, the number-two official of the financial watchdog,” as well as “Msgr. Mauro Carlino, a former aide to then-Archbishop Giovanni Angelo Becciu, one of the highest officials at the Secretariat of State [the Vatican’s executive office] until 2018, when Pope Francis made him a cardinal and put him in charge of the office for the canonization of saints.”[5]

Besides a possible unethical collusion between the Vatican’s executive’s office and the financial watchdog, the connection between Carlino and Becciu may mean that Becciu was ethically compromised even when he served as head of the office of the saints. That office may have been ethically compromised before Becciu, when Pope John Paul II, who had kept Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston in office there and then promoted him all while knowing that Law had knowingly moved rapist priests around rather than defrocking them and handing them over to the local police, was made a saint regardless. The corruption in the Vatican was thus not limited to financial scandals. Greed and ideological favoritism are arguably both species of self-aggrandizement, or self-idolatry in religious terms.

From an institutional perspective, the suspension of Di Ruzza, the number-two official of the financial watchdog founded by Pope Benedict in 2010, implicates the functioning of the department itself as a check on financial wrongdoing. Fortunately, “Pope Francis established the office of auditor general in 2014.” However, the auditor general position was still vacant since 2017, when the occupant “resigned and accused powerful officials of obstructing him.”[6] Given Di Ruzza’s suspension, as well as that of Carlino of the Secretariat of State office, perhaps powerful officials involved in the London real-estate scandal captured the financial watchdog. In short, the Vatican’s internal firewalls had likely failed completely, meaning that the Vatican could not hold itself accountable. This was readily observable to the public in the Vatican’s cover-ups protecting clergy, whether high officials such as Cardinal Law, or the rapist priests themselves, during the sex-abuse scandal.

Finally, in historical perspective, the unbridled greed even at the highest staff levels in the Vatican can be said to have been not sufficiently constrained by Christian economic ethics. In decoupling wealth from the stain of greed, the pro-wealth paradigm is susceptible to wealth from greed. This is not to suggest that a return to the hegemony of the anti-wealth paradigm, which held sway for at least the Christianity’s first millennium (with a last stance amid Europe’s economic (and population) contraction during the plague-infested mid-fourteenth century, after the Commercial Revolution). To say that virtually any profit-seeking and wealth must invariably involve the sin of greed is to make an overgeneralization, but so too is the claim that wealth itself is devoid of greed. I submit that given the power of the Roman Catholic Church due to its membership-size and sheer wealth, even high-ranking clergy are subject to a significant temptation of greed both personally and for their institution. Wealth held collectively is not immune from the greed of members whether religious or not. With the pro-wealth paradigm as a floor, Christianity itself may not be able to proffer a sufficient constraint, especially on the money-changers in the Temple—the Vatican Bank, whose existence itself may instantiate hypocrisy. This may be why the auditor general and the financial watchdog failed as checks.

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1. Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-seeking and Wealth, available at Amazon. The related academic treatise, Godliness and Greed, is also available at Amazon.

2. Ibid.

3. Francis Rocca, “A Top Vatican Official Resigns Amid London Real Estate Scandal,” The Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2019.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

Religious Violence as Hypocritical

In the movie, Boy Erased (2018), the director of a church’s conversion therapy program invites the immediate family members of one gay boy to hit him with a bible to drive out the underlying demon. The boy subsequently commits suicide. Lest this notion of using violence to remove a sin in the twenty-first century is assumed to lie in the realm of fiction, John Smyth, an Anglican, was accused in 2017 “of subjecting at least 22 teenage boys to savage beatings in his garden shed” at “an elite Christian camp for boys. His intent was “purging them of perceived sins such as masturbation and pride”[1] A Christian charity group oversaw the camp, yet I contend that the camp was not Christian.

The Latin root of charity is caritas, which means human love raised up to loving God, which as Augustine writes, is love. Whereas human love of God is caritas, God’s love is agape, which is self-emptying love. Some theologians have claimed that humans are capable of this selfless love, but Augustine says the taint of original sin is too great for divine love. John Smyth is a poster child for Augustine’s point, even though he doubtlessly thought that he was being pious in purging sins in others (it is doubtful that he savagely beat himself to purge his own sins).

If God is full or perfect being as Aquinas and Leibniz assert in their respective writings, then sin represents less than full or perfect being. Smyth’s claim then is that beating someone is a way of adding more existence to the person, which I submit does not make sense. Moreover, the beatings violate Jesus’ teaching, let the person without sin throw the first stone. Also, being focused on purging the sins of other people overlooks the plank in one’s own eye. Is masturbation such an awful sin, if the instinctual behavior is indeed sin (rather than a matter for biology). So Smyth was not acting as a follower of Christ, and thus as a Christian, even if he believed that Jesus is the Son of God and Savior.

Nevertheless, the Prosperity Gospel holds that a Christian having true belief (i.e., that Jesus is the Savoir) will receive not only soteriological benefits, but also earthly wealth from God. This relatively recent belief comes from Judaism, in which Yahweh promises to make Israel prosperous if it keeps to the covenant. At least through the first millennium of Christianity, the dominant theological attitude toward earthly wealth was negative.[2] The Prosperity Gospel could only take on after centuries in which a pro-wealth paradigm dominated Christianity. At any rate, Smyth’s abhorrent attitude and behavior suggests that having true belief counts for naught if the Christian is acting contrary to Jesus’ preachments and example. This suggests that the person who does not help a detractor or foe when he or she is in need is not a Christian even if the true belief is intact. Allowing help to flow over old and even new wounds, essentially relativizing them, is two degrees of separation from violently going after sins of others.

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[1] Ceylon Yoginsu, “Doubt Cast on When the Archbishop Knew of Abuse,” The New York Times, October 15, 2017.

[2] Skip Worden, Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010). As this text is an academic treatise, and thus difficult for non-theologians and expensive, the same idea is in the nonfiction book, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth, available at Amazon.