Debt is a Biblical issue, with verses across the Old and New Testaments calling for leniency and forgiveness. Despite this, it remains a thorny issue. JONATHAN FOYE canvases some Christian views on what can be a controversial subject…
Sydney, Australia
A new report by the United Nations’ Global Crisis Response Group, A World of Debt, recently found that 52 countries are in “serious debt trouble”.
In comments made following the release of the report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres particularly drew attention to the way poorer nations relied on private creditors who charge “sky-high” rates and were forced to borrow more “for their economic survival”. He warned that more than three billion people suffer from their governments’ need to prioritise debt interest payments over “essential investments” in the Sustainable Development Goals or in the transition to renewable energy. He attributed these levels of public debt in developing countries to what he said was “systemic failure” from colonial-era inequality built into “our outdated financial system”.
ILLUSTRATION: Nuthawut Somsuk/iStockphoto
The UN report was released shortly after the US Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s attempt to forgive some student debt. Debt – and its relief – are making headlines again. But what does the Bible say?
James McGrath is a professor of New Testament studies at Butler University in Indiana. Currently on sabbatical, Dr McGrath tells Sight that the Bible’s message on debt was consistent across its 66 books.
“The ancient economic contexts of the Biblical literature were not all the same, but they were all more like one another than like our own time and place,” McGrath says.
James McGrath. PICTURE: Supplied
“If you didn’t make your rent payments you and your family would be sold into slavery. The Bible’s answer to this was the Jubilee year (Leviticus 25), when once a generation debts would be cancelled and land returned to the family that originally owned it.”
“Most people lived through agriculture. The main way people fell into debt was when a crop failed due to drought, locusts, or disease. All one could do was borrow money and buy seed to plant again. Even if there wasn’t a second year of crop failure, unless you were far along the spectrum towards the other end from subsistence farming, paying back the debt would be a challenge. Eventually the moneylender would claim the land as payment. You then ended up farming your own land as a tenant of the moneylender, paying them rent.”
McGrath points out that while, if you “didn’t make your rent payments you and your family would be sold into slavery”, the “Bible’s answer to this was the Jubilee year (Leviticus 25), when once a generation debts would be cancelled and land returned to the family that originally owned it”.
“A complete reset once a generation to prevent people falling endlessly into slavery or poverty that then was inherited by each subsequent generation with no hope of improvement. The possibility of upward mobility is over-estimated in the minds of many today in the English speaking world, but in the ancient Mediterranean world there was much less prospect of that.”
McGrath says the Torah also included legislation – “in essence a tax on farmers – which required them “to leave the edges of their fields unharvested so that the poor could help themselves”.
When it comes to the New Testament, Mc Grath says that a text from there that springs immediately to mind is the Lord’s Prayer which, as he points out, “in one version asks for forgiveness of our debts as we forgive our debtors”.
“While what we owe to God and have not or cannot repay may be a metaphorical debt or at least not primarily financial, it is not entirely without financial implication,” McGrath says. “People owed God tithes and when they failed to pay them Malachi called it robbing God. So too the debts that we are to forgive others are not exclusively financial but neither are literal money debts excluded.”
Daniel Smith-Christopher, a professor of Old Testament studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, says forgiveness of debts was “praised in both Old and New Testaments”.
“What Mosaic Law establishes, Jesus only takes further!”
How to apply Scripture’s teachings to contemporary issues regarding debt is the subject of a wide gulf between scholars.
Dr R Albert Mohler, Jr, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary – the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention – has argued against student loan forgiveness, calling it a violation of justice and a “moral hazard” that incentivises bad behaviour.
“Of course, what we’re looking at here is a massive redistribution of wealth,” he says in an article on his website.
“There is no doubt that many people are being crushed by this debt. But they took out the debt. They signed all those loan agreements. They understood at the time what they were doing and they just piled up the debt.”
Mohler says there are “two issues of justice” involved.
“Number one, what about all those students who’ve repaid their debt? What about all those people, over the course of the last several decades, who have faithfully repaid their debt? How just is it now, just to wipe out the debt that is held by current student debtors? Or there’s another thing, how many students didn’t go to, say their college A because they simply decided, ‘I can’t afford to take that much out in loans’?”
A protest calling for the cancellation of student debts outside the White House in Washington DC, US, in this undated image. PICTURE: Orlowski Designs LLC/Shutterstock
Dr McGrath says there are challenges in how to apply the Bible’s principles to modern poverty and debt forgiveness.
“I think there are principles one can glean (pun intended) from the Bible about justice. Our society is very different, however. There are far more urban poor and unharvested edges of fields off in the countryside would help little. Likewise giving everyone their ancestral land back once a generation would not help most people”
“After the collapse of Communism in Romania and other Eastern and Central European countries, land that had been collectivised was returned to the families that owned it previously. A significant number of people could do little with the land, having worked their entire lives in the city by that point and having little or no farming experience.”
However, Dr McGrath is blunt about why he thinks debt forgiveness is a controversial topic in the United States.
“I think it is mostly a result of Christianity having been twisted to reflect American values of individualism and the even more un-Christian notion that people get what they deserve and otherwise must suffer the consequences,” he said.
“The whole debt image that Jesus used was about the fact that we owe God a debt we could never repay. In the parable, the individual who owes the large about owes something akin to a national debt. Jesus warned that those who know that God does not hold them accountable for their inability to render to God what is due, yet who do not forgive others in the same way, will have their debt reinstated.”
“Most Americans who consider themselves Christians don’t genuinely care about or believe what Jesus taught. Now, as I made clear, different times, cultures, and economic contexts require sensitive application of Biblical principles. I’m not promoting so-called ‘Biblical literalism’ but pointing out that those who claim to be ‘Bible-believing Christians’ are nothing of the sort.”
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Dr Daniel Smith-Christopher. PICTURE: Supplied
Smith-Christopher is more blunt still, telling Sight that he believes some parts of the debt policy debate were hypocritical. He argues that the type of debt and the recipient determined whether or not people were sympathetic to debt forgiveness.
“It is interesting how sweet-heart government deals for big business and big agriculture is never called “socialism”,” he said. “Massive payments to farmers as subsidies, provision of free government land for grazing (a massive subsidy), and massive tax breaks to big business – all of these are never called “socialism”. Only when the poor and students are forgiven…clearly, it is a shameful hypocrisy.”
Smith-Christopher says the student loan issue “participates in both parts of this argument, the religious and the political”.
“Many students took out loans to shady lenders, and many students were impoverished because the government drastically cut back student aid in favour of big business lenders who lend money to students. So, on the business side we are talking planned exploitation.”
“The Bible praises loan forgiveness, so I would say don’t even waste your breath claiming a Biblical religious reason to protest debt cancellation. If you are going to protest debt cancellation (and of course, only for progressive institutions like higher education) you had better stay well away from the Bible.”
