The Bible is controversial because people hold very different opinions about what the Bible is. Some people believe that every word of the Bible is literal truth. Some believe that the Bible is a source of moral guidance and compelling stories. Some believe that the Bible is nothing more than ancient superstitions.

No matter what you believe about the validity of the Bible, the Bible continues to affect what people believe about many important topics, such as the meaning of human life, human worth, marriage, slavery, war, sex, government, and money. Let's pick just one topic that affects all of us. What is the Biblical teaching about money?

Before we can go any further, we need to stop and qualify the question. The biggest problem for interpretation of any topic is that the Bible is not really a single book. Yes, you can buy a book called the Bible. It is bound and organized with a table of contents into a single document. But the name "Bible" comes from the Greek word meaning "books." The book we call the Bible is really a collection of books.

You will always find people who "prove" what "the Bible teaches" on any particular topic because they can quote particular Bible verses to make their case. You will also find people who "prove" just the opposite based on other Bible verses.

The only way to get beyond such contradictory arguments is to recognize that the Bible was not written as a coherent, organized book. Instead, it is a collection of widely divergent material from different historical eras, geographical locations, and originally written in different languages. And the collection itself has been edited and expanded, and then edited some more.

The Bible has many stories about money and wealth, but they come from different economic eras than our own. Many of the earliest stories in the Bible are about nomads, who lived as herders rather than farmers. Other stories were written about people living as farmers in agrarian societies, where wealth was based on control of the land. Money in a capitalist economy is far different from money in societies based on herding or farming. If you consult the Bible to find out "what the Bible teaches about money," you need to be clear about the economic system behind the particular stories.

People often read the Bible as if they are stories written in today's newspaper. People will ignore the differences between these economic systems, to look for direct answers to apply directly to our own capitalist era.

Do you believe that stories about nomads such as Abraham prove that God wants you to be rich? Do you believe that sayings of Jesus, such as, Blessed are the poor," prove that God wants you to be poor? Or are you simply confused by the conflicting stories? If you want to know what the Bible teaches about money, what do you do?

I saw an example of confusion and conflict once at a seminar about creating wealth. I heard a man ask the speaker: "How can you say it is good to be rich? Jesus said that a rich man cannot get into heaven"

In fact, the man had misquoted a story told in the Gospel of Matthew. (The same story is also told in the Gospels of Mark and Luke.) "Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God'" (Matthew 19: 23-24.)

The point that the man at the seminar missed was that a rich man at the time of Jesus was rich for one reason. He was part of the ruling class in an agrarian society. It was a society in which a few very rich people controlled the land and made life miserable for the vast majority of the society.

Jesus was not talking about being rich in a capitalist economy, where it is possible to be rich without exploiting other people. Yet, the man who asked the question treated the words of the story as a direct commentary on being rich in a capitalist economy.

This is what happens so often when people misquote the Bible and misunderstood the stories and economic contexts of the stories. The only way to begin to answer the kind of question the man at the seminar asked is to pay attention to economic contexts and the intentions behind the stories themselves.