O Lord, who shall sojourn in your tent? Who
shall dwell on your holy hill? He who walks blamelessly and does what is
right and speaks truth in his heart;who does not slander with his tongue and
does no evil to his neighbour, nor takes up a reproach against his friend; in
whose eyes a vile person is despised, but who honours those who fear the Lord;
who swears to his own hurt and does not change; who does not put out his money
at interest and does not take a bribe against the innocent. He who does these
things shall never be moved.
Psalm 15
I am continuing the theme from last weekend. The
most common modern understanding of usury today is that it is excessive
interest on a loan. When I used to try to apply that interpretation to the
Bible passages, they simply did not make sense. A particular problem was that
if usury was excessive interest, what
word was used for legitimate
interest? I therefore came to accept John Calvin’s interpretation, that usury
was interest on a loan to relieve poverty but that interest was legitimate for
other types of credit, although I was not entirely satisfied with that explanation.
Soon
after I began teaching personal finance skills at schools and colleges, I
needed to understand the concerns of Muslims about many modern financial
products. Islamic finance (or Sharia-compliant finance) forbids riba, which is
the Arabic word for usury. I then realised that in the 5th Century,
Christians, Jews and Muslims all believed that usury meant interest – any and all interest – and that charging it was wrong, even if many religious
people did it.
Gradually,
people became convinced that usury, or interest, was necessary for lenders to
guarantee for themselves financial gain from a mix of borrowers and, during the
theological upheavals of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the
prohibition was reinvented.
Moreover,
theologians began to assume that Jesus had himself sanctioned usury in the
parables of the talents and the minas (or pounds), recorded in Matthew 25 and
Luke 19, respectively. They decided that this signalled that the prohibition
was, like so many other prohibitions in the Torah no longer applicable. I think
Jesus was simply acknowledging that unscrupulous people charged interest!
Why is
this important? Or even relevant to our reflections on Babylon and the Beast? I
hope this will become clear tomorrow.
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Copyright © All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans
2013.
Scripture
quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright
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