William Dwight Porter Bliss, Richard Theodore Ely, the pope, and Jesus give us a common vision for a more moral world.
William Dwight Porter Bliss and Richard Theodore Ely
Luke 16:19–31
I love this teaching from Jesus because it describes the problem so well. The problem being our general confusion about our place in the story.
Here is a rich man suffering twice. Suffering because of his wealth. And suffering because he can’t see that he is the cause of his own suffering.
The most telling moment comes when he begs Father Abraham to have Lazarus, the poor man, to come serve him; to save him. And then still, to save him in haunting.
The abstraction here does us little service. Imagine a wealthy businessman, rotting and all he can think of is to call room service. He’s calling out to Father Abraham like he’s dialing the front desk. Send that poor man to give me something to drink.
Because the homeless man on the street is essentially the same as the bellhop in the hotel. They’re all worthless to him. Poor. Lazy. Of no true moral character. In his eyes: of equal value to society. Which is to say: none.
I can’t overstate how insane this request really is. For the rich man to beg for mercy that doesn’t require any sacrifice for him. That paints the poor in the same servant’s role. That places him as the victim.
Please, warn my family! he says.
They have scripture to warn them. Isn’t that telling?
Lovers of Money
This parable comes after a bunch of teaching on economics. Which, let’s be honest, is never really about fairness and hard work. No matter what we like to think.
At the beginning of this chapter, Jesus tells the parable of the dishonest manager. A teaching which deals way more with relationships than it does cash flow.
And at the end of the teaching, Jesus says the famous line:
“You cannot serve God and wealth.”
The biblical word here, isn’t wealth, but Mammon. Which is greed; accumulation. You can’t serve two masters; two desires. God, full of generosity AND Mammon, full of accumulating resources.
The very next line:
“The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they ridiculed him.”
This parable about the rich man and Lazarus; that’s the rebuttal.
They love money more than God. And that love blinds them to what is really happening.
William Dwight Porter Bliss and Richard Theodore Ely
Today we remember William Dwight Porter Bliss and Richard Theodore Ely. Here is what the church tells us about them: (Read in Great Cloud of Witnesses)
These two men described the dangers of the modern economic theory of the time. Particularly as it was allowed to run without competition and in light of obvious moral failures.
The moral component may be the most important factor we have conveniently excised from the discussion. We prefer to allow political ideologies to compete as if our ideas themselves exist in a meritocratic institutional structure, rather than something more akin to an underground dog-fighting circuit.
In fact, it is the moral basis that Ely and Bliss draw their direction from. Child labor, incredible abuse of power by owners at the expense of labor, and the seeming Darwinian drive to impoverish masses of people at the service of wealth creation comes, not from an amoral or magically self-regulating system, but from an immoral system which exploits because there is insufficient power to restrain that excess.
“Too Political”
How fortunate for us to also get Pope Francis’ encyclical letter this week. He writes:
“The marketplace, by itself, cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith. Whatever the challenge, this impoverished and repetitive school of thought always offers the same recipes. Neoliberalism simply reproduces itself by resorting to the magic theories of “spillover” or “trickle” – without using the name – as the only solution to societal problems. There is little appreciation of the fact that the alleged “spillover” does not resolve the inequality that gives rise to new forms of violence threatening the fabric of society.”
Too simply dismissed as “too political,” the teaching in the Pope’s letter to his people is consistent with not only the critiques made by Bliss and Ely, but of Jesus’s critiques of those in power during his time on earth. Those who love money cannot see how it obscures their vision and prevents them from seeing the means of grace in the world.
Categories
One of the easiest ways to dismiss those with which we disagree is to simply categorize them. So we can sort each other into easy buckets. The bigger question is found in the veracity of the critique itself.
While Bliss accepted the vision of socialism, Ely did not. He saw the flaws in both capitalism and socialism as, in a sense, mutually disqualifying. Neither render the justice we seek or connect us to the primary burden of our moment. Just as the Pope describes it, an economic theory that has rendered immoral outcomes inevitable is unacceptable to people of faith.
The fact that we had a recession in 2007 and ’08 that has yet to see any recovery for our poor is an abomination. That the people most at risk during a pandemic twelve years later are those same people is our moral failure as a people.
This reveals that the persistent extremism of our culture is not found in our partisanship, but in our common acceptance of total individualism. Individualism is an extremist position. The Social Gospel is a corrective to the middle.
Going back to that parable.
We don’t have heaven and hell in this story. We have restoration and separation. And it is the rich man who is trapped. Isolated. Indvidualized. Atomized. Alone. There is no community, no servants, no means of protecting his way of life with walls or his family with warnings. He has exiled himself. And his demands of other individuals fail. As Abraham points out that his family can choose their fate individually.
But God seeks to restore us all, inviting us all, to gather all as one. Not through money—through the love of or accumulation of it. Not through market forces sold as a magical tonic, but always comes out as snake oil.
Through community. Service. Love. Through our commitment to one another and our social fabric. A commitment to protecting “the least of these” and making our common life more real. Like ensuring we all have today our daily bread. We all. Not each! All! Every day.