Spiritual Hiccups - Banned in the Bible

Today's psalm asks who may come into God's presence, and the answer contains things we might expect, people who do what is right, who fear the LORD, who keep their word, who hate evil, and so on.  But the final attributes may surprise some.  They are those "who do not lend money at interest, and do not take a bribe against the innocent."

In Hebrew poetry, ideas are rhymed rather than words, and so in the Psalms you see verses that describe pairs, parallelisms.  And so the 23rd Psalm ends, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD my whole life long." 

In this morning's psalm, the final pair links lending money at interest with taking bribes against the innocent.  Bankers have certainly taken a big public relations hit in recent years, but I don't think many of us associate making loans with bribery.  We may distrust big banks, but many of us know local bankers we consider pillars of the community.  But our psalm says those who lend money at interest may not enter God's presence, and it pairs them with those who take bribes to pervert justice.

If I were to employ Scripture the way people so often do, I would need to start a campaign to stamp out lending as we know it.  Perhaps I and any followers I could garner would make signs and protest outside of banks the way people protest against same-sex marriage.  After all, my group would be able to quote the Bible in the same fashion.

The fact is that Christians were generally forbidden to engage in banking for the first 1500 years of the faith.  (Jewish stereotypes related to finance and banking grew, in part, out of their doing this "despised" work that Christians could not.)  But 500 years ago, John Calvin argue persuasively for lending money at interest despite a biblical prohibition.  In a creative, innovative move that many may have trouble associating with their image of Calvin, he argued that borrowed money used to build factories that employed people and improved their lives was in keeping with the intent of the prohibition on lending.  That prohibition, he said, was there to protect the poor from being trapped by debt.  But if lending actually ended up helping the poor, then it produced the good that the ban on lending intended.

Just as an aside, it should be clear that lending which did trap people in poverty, or which did not seem to produce the sort of "good" the ban on lending intended, would not fit within Calvin's exception to the biblical ban.  But of course, once Calvin opened the door to lending, people soon forgot that it was an exception that had conditions.  And then they, and we, forgot that the Bible banned the practice in the first place.

All this is a long way of getting at how often we use the Bible to get the results we wish.  We find those verses that give ammunition to our causes, often employing them in a context totally different from the one is Scripture.  Much more rarely, if at all, do we read the Bible as a whole, listening to its overall witness.  That was what Calvin was trying to do when who came up with his exception to the ban on lending, but he was also influenced by the growing business need for capital in Geneva at that time.

I think that every Christian occasionally needs to assess his or her relationship with the Bible.  Is it a witness that points us to Jesus, revealing to us things we could never know otherwise?  Or do we simply believe what we believe - wherever that may have come from - and then cling to those Bible passages that fit with what we already hold dear? 

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