Bible Verses and Your Income
Gospel of Wealth or Poverty? connects your financial status and your biblical beliefs. The question mark in the title challenges an either/or choice between wealth or poverty based on Bible verses.
Wealth and poverty are significant themes in the Bible. If you focus on isolated Bible verses, you can claim that God wants you to be poor. You can also claim that God wants you to rich. But neither argument can be justified if you go beyond the verses and read whole stories set in their original social, economic, political, and religious contexts.
A Hero and Income Inequality
The inequality scales on the book cover represent the unjust imbalance between wealth and poverty. Significant portions of the Bible focus on economic injustices inflicted by the rich rulers against the poor. This is particularly evident in the New Testament Gospel stories of Jesus about the salvation of oppressed people from the economic injustices of the ruling class.
Gospel of Wealth or Poverty? goes beyond an either/or approach to eight specific statements about wealth and poverty in the New Testament gospels to see Jesus as a hero on a hero's journey about economic injustice.
Eight Misunderstood Bible Verses
What did Jesus really say in the New Testament Gospel stories about:
- "God and Mammon" in the Beatitudes, the Gospel of Matthew
- "Bread and debts" in the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke
- "Blessed are the poor" in the Beatitudes, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke
- "Taxes to Caesar," the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke
- "The money changers in the temple," the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
- "Honoring your father and your mother," in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark
- "The poor widow," in the Gospels of Mark and Luke
- "The rich young man," in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke
How to Become a Money Hero
Heroism responds to a threat. The New Testament gospels are whole stories about a hero who confronted income inequality at its source of power. They are not constraining rulebooks but liberating stories. Don't let misunderstood Bible verses about "what Jesus said about money" keep you struggling with guilt and fear about money. Get your copy of Gospel of Wealth or Poverty? now to find out how you can become your own money hero.
About the Author: Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson is an author, biblical scholar, and former teacher in theological seminaries.She offers a liberating perspective on the Bible by focusing on the impact of Bible translations on what people believe about the Bible and about themselves.
She earned her Ph.D. in Biblical Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, in cooperation with the University of California at Berkeley. She is a former teacher of university and theological seminary students.
As a biblical scholar, she carefully investigates translations of familiar Bible stories to show how often what people believe "the Bible says" is the result of misleading translations.
She currently lives with her husband in North Las Vegas, Nevada, where she writes and publishes books, publishes articles on her sometimes neglected websites, works out at the gym, goes on hikes in the desert with her camera in hand, watches movies, and stays out of casinos.
