I was offered an internship that started two months after my college graduation. It was a pretty cool gig — almost my idea of a dream job at the time, even if the official title was somewhat ridiculous: I would be the Social and Ethical Responsibility in Investments Associate for the American Baptist Home Mission Society.
There were two parts to that job, and I was excited about both of them. The first part involved shareholder activism. Like most religious institutions, the Baptists had endowments and pension funds. Those funds were invested in the stock market. Being significant shareholders meant they had some influence — albeit limited — on the actions and policies of the companies in which they were invested. So one part of my job as an SER Associate would involve trying to wield that influence to leverage greater social responsibility on the part of the companies in which the Baptists were invested.
The other part of the job was simple Baileyism. The Baptists also maintained a smaller portfolio of what they called “alternative investments” — funds that promised a more modest financial return, but a far greater social benefit. This money was invested in community banks, credit unions and community development loan funds — institutions like the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan from It’s a Wonderful Life. These “alternative investments” weren’t charity — they provided a safe and steady, if unspectacular, trickle of income for the Baptist pension fund. But while they helped to fund the Baptists’ ministries, they also helped to create jobs and affordable housing for working people in communities all over the country.
This internship meant I’d get to do all of that as my job. I thought that sounded awesome.
But there was also a problem — a big problem. This was all usury. Taking this job would make me a usurer — a money-lender collecting interest. And I knew what the Bible had to say about usury and usurers.
I was genuinely torn and couldn’t decide whether or not I could accept this internship, biblically. Yes, that’s how I was thinking about it, in exactly those terms. I was an idealistic young white evangelical Christian, so I tended to think about everything in those terms. “Biblical” and “biblically” were my favorite adjective and adverb.
On the one hand, George Bailey seemed like a hero to me. What could be better than helping to support families and communities just like he did in that classic Christmas movie? It seemed innocent enough — not just harmless, but helpful. But that’s not what the Bible said.
“What you are doing is not right,” said the prophet Nehemiah. “Let us stop charging interest! Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves and houses, and also the interest you are charging them — one percent of the money, grain, new wine and olive oil.”
That’s Nehemiah 5:9-11. Chapter and verse.
These alternative investments with their modest interest rates might seem to me to be a wise way to help the working poor, but I also had heard hundreds of sermons reminding me that “the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.” I’d even preached a couple of sermons like that myself. I knew that “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom,” and that it was always dangerous to think that we knew better than what we read in the inerrant Word of God.
I had become something of a do-gooder activist sort in college. My nickname was “Lefty,” and I’d voted for Michael Dukakis. But I was still, very much, an evangelical believer. I was immersed in the clobber-text hermeneutic of white evangelical Christianity, and it just was not possible for me to disregard all the many clobber-texts I had found condemning the sin of usury.
So before I was able to accept that internship, I scheduled appointments with a bunch of professors — good evangelical people who taught at my good evangelical college. I asked them to help me sort this out. This job and the work it would let me do seemed like a Good Thing. But the Bible, over and over again, clearly said that such interest-bearing investment was a Bad Thing. It was forbidden. A sin. An “abomination” detestable in the sight of God.
It was finals time and these professors were busy, but some very patient professors in the graduate program in economic development still took the time to sit down with an undergrad English major, even though I was asking some fundamentally naive questions that amounted, more or less, to an accusation that their entire profession was an unbiblical affront to God. I came to them with a list of texts that seemed to me to be insurmountable, and I was expecting a conversation that would be focused on those texts, but that wasn’t how those conversations went.
Instead, with great patience, they talked with me about the difference between our modern context and the ancient context of those formidable biblical texts prohibiting usury. They talked about the underlying ethical principles at work in those texts — prohibiting the exploitation of the poor, and what that principle should mean today, in our context. It would be unjust, they said, to apply a rule meant to prohibit the exploitation of the poor in such a way that it resulted in harming the very people the rule was originally meant to protect. An absolute prohibition against all lending for interest would deny the poor the access to credit that the enables the non-poor to thrive. In our context, today, it’s that denial of access to credit from legitimate sources that often forces the poor to turn to predatory usurers. Shut down the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan and everyone will be forced to crawl to Old Man Potter.
This was, for me, the beginning of a hermeneutic epiphany. It was my first serious encounter with another way of reading the Bible beyond the clobber-text hermeneutic that had been ingrained in me my whole life. And it was liberating — a first taste of the notion that this vast agglomeration of “biblical” rules I’d been carrying around as an endless list weren’t the main point. Despite all the many times I’d read those words from Jesus and from Paul, this was one of the first times it really sunk in for me that “Love is the fulfillment of the law.”
I’d like to be able to tell you that this was a transforming epiphany for me — that from then on I abandoned my prior clobber-texting mentality and embraced a deeper, better, more mature approach to reading the Bible. But, alas, this was only a first step in a long process. Yet it was enough to convince me to take that internship, which really did turn out to be a dream job.
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