“It was not until I spent five years in prison—where I had time to study the Bible in its entirety—that I began to understand that I had built my prosperity theology on a few isolated, misinterpreted verses of Scripture. . . . As I poured over the World of God, the Holy Spirit used the Scriptures to convince me that I, like so many of my former colleagues, had merely been preaching what I had heard other preachers say. I passed along things I had read in somebody else’s books, rather than carefully examining the Scriptures to see what God had to say. I was an unwitting false prophet.” —Jim Bakker

I’ve spent the past fifteen years seriously studying faith and finance. During that time, I’ve found that those who combine the two are either the very best of advisors, such as my mentor the mutual fund manager Sir John Templeton, or the very worst, such as those who simply sell our faith for a few pieces of silver. Inevitably, the difference has been that the very best share what people truly need while the very worst sell what people think they want.

Frankly, my noting such difficult realities is why some see me as an outspoken and contrary cuss. And I have often disagreed with what was sold to Christianity over the federal debt, our economy, Y2K, ethical investing and so on. But being a warm and fuzzy guy, I feel I have simply been persecuted by those who are selling fear and greed rather than sharing faith and charity. Unfortunately, they have been primarily evangelical media ministries. For example, I quit my Christian radio commentary due to my network’s refusal to broadcast my response to Y2K nonsense. While that shortened my radio career, the head of the National Religious Broadcasters asked me to write a cover story for its magazine. It paralleled Y2K nonsense with the nonsense over the federal debt and was entitled “Y2K: The Bug That Ate Stewardship.” Few broadcasters seemed bugged by it. That meant few evangelicals knew about my writings while buying some books that might not go down in history with Pilgrim’s Progress.

There’s an old saying that it’s difficult to get someone to understand something when he’s paid a small fortune not to understand it. And fear-based religion is very big business in America. The one letter I did get from a major financial ministry wasn’t, shall we say, a fan letter. But once again, I’m going to suggest that combining faith and finance can be opposite sides of the same coin, as with mammon and tithing. There is both a negative and positive side. So I now find myself joining the National Association of Christian Financial Consultants, a largely evangelical organization that integrates faith and finance. Evangelical leaders can be a clubby as the guys at Augusta National. But these duffers have made this old Lutheran feel quite at home. The NACFC debates theology as openly and profitably as Luther debated the pope; Luther debated Erasmus; Luther debated—well you get the idea.

Perhaps as I too have that stubborn German blood, I’m most happy when government, corporate and religious leaders balance claims to Truth with the humility to debate them. That’s terribly important today as Wall Street has been as afraid of religion as the clergy has been of money. So Christians who need to integrate faith and business are a huge but neglected market. If you are a financial professional who is thinking about serving that community, or are simply part of it, you might be interested in why I’m yoking with the NACFC.

The non-believing Nobel-laureate economist Robert Fogel has predicted The Fourth Great Awakening lies immediately ahead. And he says you can no longer understand political economy without understanding religion. Yet if Luther proved anything, it is that religious thinking can be quite different, even within the same religion. That’s why Douglas North, another recent Nobel-laureate in economics, teaches a concept called “asymmetric information.” It basically says that there are still two streams of information: good and bad. He also says that a person’s success is still primarily determined by getting in the right stream. That’s been true since the Israelites debated listening to God’s promises of four hundred years or the religious leaders who had spied out the Promised Land and were less hopeful.

Unfortunately, “postmodernism” has taught us for decades that there is no right and wrong. There’s only truth with a small “t” or what we think is true at the moment for the particular situation we face. That way of thinking permeates both the church and Wall Street. Some would say that it permeates Wall Street as it permeates the church but that’s another story. Yet as evidenced by the confusing, nuanced, ironic and paradoxical parables of Christ, Truth does not always appear to us humans as black and white but as shades of gray. That will come as no surprise to any Christian executive who has actually worked on Wall Street or in corporate America. But it may surprise some popular Christian authors. For example, a recent book claims that The Golden Rule is the only ethic businesspeople need. That may be true. But we need to understand hundreds of other principles in the Bible in order to truly understand The Golden Rule. That’s why these passages too were canonized, even if rejected by popular authors. As I have previously stated, that stubborn German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out that Luther didn’t even think his contemporaries understood that the biblical perspective of “love” is not about agreeing with fellow club members but about caring enough about Truth and neighbor to disagree on occasion.

Unfortunately, while there are several popular leaders teaching The Golden Rule to tens of millions, there are very, very few helping investors to truly understand it. Other experiences might better illustrate the church’s abundance of breadth and poverty of depth. After several financially rewarding but unfulfilling years on Wall Street, this lay leader of his church thought of attending seminary to study faith and finance. My denomination asked me to do independent study as none of its seminaries taught anything about the subject. That was despite money being a prevalent topic of the Bible, a favorite topic of Moses and Jesus, and the love of money being the root of all evil. You’ll have to read an obscure theology book rather than a popular financial book to find them, but Luther’s 95 Theses were penned the evening of his encounter with an official raising money to build St. Peter’s in Rome. The official’s theologically challenged worldview was that people could get to heaven if they’d just give a few coins. If you think about it, that’s not far from the stewardship message that most Christians hear today.

Fortunately, I was working within a denominational structure rather than as a theological Lone Ranger. So I had friends who generally knew that John Wesley, who also knew a thing or two about awakenings, had two great fears: 1) that people would embrace forms of faith without its true power and 2) that newly converted enthusiasts would pave the road to hell by attempting The Great Commission without having first mastered The Great Commandment. That is, with the best of intentions, they’d rush to save others with shallow faith before they had paused to disciple themselves more deeply.

Due to my mother’s faithfulness and German will, I once attended our Southern Baptist Sunday School for six years without missing a Sunday. And I won lots of Bible contests as we were so poor the only book this voracious reader owned was a big book of Bible stories. But due to my friends’ counsel, I began my studies by re-reading the Bible. I then began to read both obscure books from economic theologians and popular books from Christian financial advisors. Oddly, even though the popular books claimed to be teaching biblical principles, I found they were often teaching the exact opposite of what I, theologians, and church historians had read in the Bible and gleaned from the traditions of our faith.

For example, one of the most popular books was written by a very visible Christian financial planner during the inflationary days of the eighties. He basically taught that the only investment you need to keep up with inflation, which he termed a “myth,” is a money market fund. As interest rates go up in inflationary times and down in disinflationary times, you always keep up. That simplistic advice appealed to tens of thousands within what Christianity Today has termed the financial “land of the blind,” so the book has had over twenty printings. Unfortunately, there are serious financial, spiritual and theological problems with that “biblical concept.” Financially, even though the author had been trained as a CPA, he basically ignored the impact of taxes, which any rookie stock broker knows is the Achilles heel of trying to keep up with inflation with short-term investments. Also, any economy is highly dependent on long-term investments, which money market funds do not make. That may be why it is important to consider actually diversifying into several different investments.

As financially impoverishing as the author’s simplistic advice was, he forgot to make other connections that probably caused even greater damage to the “mind of Christ.” The failure to holistically make connections between the various disciplines of life—like investing and accounting—is called “compartmentalized thinking.” It is probably the defining characteristic of the postmodern mind that has replaced the mind of Christ. It is most popular as it makes it possible to believe several truths at the same time, rather than believe the Truth. Wesley defined the holistic mind of Christ as the essence of religion as it produces clarity rather than confusion, and peace, both internally and externally, rather than tension, both internally and externally. Remember all the fights within and without over the federal debt?

Perhaps exhibiting how the postmodern mind wanders from truth to truth, after a few years of falling inflation and lower interest rates, the planner/author turned away from money market funds and advocated investing primarily in shopping malls. This was despite the fact that he and his ministry friends preached that Americans spend too much time and money shopping. But not to worry, as another truth is always coming. After Congress took away some of the benefits of real estate investing and the bull market in stocks hit new high after high, the planner/author began finding merit in stocks. Any stock, in any company, producing any product, even if ministries knew those products were morally bankrupting our post-Christian nation. After all, there’s Truth for Bible study and truth for financial planning. If that postmodern dichotomy makes you comfortable, you should stop reading. If it makes you nervous, please invest a few more minutes as biblical Truth has enriched my life even as it has cost me money on occasion. Now don’t panic, for as promised, God still provides far more money than I need.

The Bible clearly describes how the love of God and neighbor as self—or prudence and ethics—was most evident in every asset class the ancients managed. You’ll have to invest more time than we have here with my website at www.financialseminary.org to understand that deeper reality. But for years, the other author/planner disagreed when I wondered if we Christians should be financing companies producing pornography, cigarettes, hard liquor, gambling, abortificants, weapons and so on. The planner/author wondered if you can make enough money without doing so. But I’ve never found a biblical principle with a footnote saying that it is to be obeyed as long as it makes more money than doing otherwise. Fortunately, I’ve also never found a Wall Street study that says long-term investors won’t do as well by investing in truly beneficial companies. Yet when asked about investment ethics, the other author/planner’s firm distributed a rationalization about why Christians shouldn’t bother. Interestingly, after the planner left the business—and Enron, rather than ministries, made ethical investing the fastest growing phenomenon on Wall Street, and ethical investors the fastest growing market—the author began teaching that ethical investing may be a biblical principal after all.

The Bible clearly says “fear not” are the first two words humanity hears when connecting with the divine. But fear sells. That’s why even the religious media tells us about planes crashing rather than arriving ahead of schedule. So the author/planner worked very closely with best-selling prophets of doom. Yet when the market and Y2K proved them to be false prophets, he began teaching the merits of faith versus fear. And it turns out that we shouldn’t even be afraid to enter a Merrill Lynch office to talk with a broker from our church. That’s worth knowing, as the author/planner’s most popular book concluded with the advice that Christians should only consult Christian financial planning firms, like his. But after leaving the business, he now has plans to teach tens of thousands of brokers within “secular” Wall Street firms the “biblical” principles that made him popular. Perhaps the past two decades of wandering the financial desert have humbled him toward his fellow advisors. But being German, I’m skeptical. I once worked with an investment firm that was an arm of a Christian denomination. It was associated with a Bible-belt based brokerage firm that handled its securities business. At one time, I thought it was genuinely interested in my helping Christian brokers understand the connections between faith and finance. I left when I grew to believe it was interested in shearing rather than feeding His sheep.

So I’d offer this counsel to any investor looking for a Christian financial advisor practicing biblical principles, or looking to become such an advisor. Yoke with a mentor who has studied enough to nuance the difference between dying to self in order to grow God’s Kingdom and selfishly enlarging his or her business territory. Yes, I know a popular book says Jabez would pray for larger territory if he worked on Wall Street. But the Gospels tell us that even Jesus, who was feeling rather lonely and homeless at the time, prayed for a larger Kingdom for God. So yoke with a mentor who actually practices the financial principles of the Bible rather than one who simply teaches a few “man-made laws” that sound obscurely biblical (Mt 15:9). Sure, as even Satan can quote scripture for his own purposes, it’s always been difficult to nuance those differences. That’s why Jesus said it is like a camel passing through the eye of the needle. But if you’re truly interested in a more abundant life, you’ll simply have to invest the time and talent. Otherwise, you’ll invest lots of treasure, both spiritual and financial.

Now, if you’re more interested in growing the Kingdom than your portfolio, again consider the theological dilemmas of “Bible-believing” Christians simply earning interest from money market funds. The Bible and church councils through several centuries strictly forbade Christians from earning interest by lending money to one another. In colonial America, Christians were thrown out of churches and communities for earning too much, a sin more likely to get you on most any church or ministry board today. Yet even today, there are banks in Central Pennsylvania that cater to Old Order Amish who live the agricultural lifestyles of biblical times and don’t want to earn interest. The shunning of interest is still a central tenet of Islamic finance as the Koran, which shares many financial principles of the Bible, forbids it for our cousins in Abraham.

Both groups prefer to collect “dividends” paid on equity investments. Historically, they’ve been rewarded as stocks and real estate ownership have outperformed money market funds manyfold. Ethically, the savings and loan crisis of the eighties was basically caused by investors earning interest from companies not making money. Taxpayers, or our neighbors, made up the difference. That’s hardly a case of investors loving our neighbors as ourselves. So perhaps exemplifying the tensions between trained theologians and enthusiastic Christian financial planners anxious to sell you what you’ll buy, church historians know the earning of interest was indeed forbidden until Luther, Calvin and others legitimated it. Not coincidentally, the Protestant Reformation enabled the Industrial Revolution that created the modern West. Some theologians maintain that Luther sold out to the bankers. Perhaps. But he may have simply drawn on The Parable of the Talents to let medieval and future Christians at least risk their savings in non-insured banks rather than hoard it in safe but unproductive mattresses.

Now, I know how much conservative Bible-believing Christians like to safely but fearfully earn interest from t-bills rather than take the risks of equities. So over the years, I’ve read several attempts by non-historians to rationalize the Biblical principle away. For example, some maintain that “usury” is only about charging a “high” rate of interest. Conveniently, that allows us to earn interest on the government bonds that unsophisticated investors prefer but avoid interest from junk bonds that we wouldn’t buy anyway. But is “high” the 5% paid by governments today, or the 15% paid in the eighties? My point is that we “Bible-believing” Christians may not want to admit it but while we may be social and political conservatives, we’re often quick to take liberties with the economic teachings of the Bible.

That economic reality is humbling for those who think we’re better Christians than our liberal brothers and sisters who are taking liberties with biblical social teachings. So it often prompts one of two responses: 1) an acknowledgment that we too have fallen short, which is enriching for the soul and Christian unity, or 2) some creative theology, which isn’t enriching to anything. For as Jim Bakker confessed, creative theology is simply another dimension of postmodern culture and its acceptance of multiple truths. Nor is it good for the kingdom as multiple truths require teachers who can turn biblical principles upside-down at will, even if it’s most confusing. Ironically, I have grown to believe their work of inverting the Bible rather than culture has contributed significantly to the growth of conservative churches and ministries, at least until most recently. Avoiding moral constraints on our financial lives but thinking we’re good stewards—largely by giving to make our churches more comfortable and our ministries more entertaining—appeals to postmodern boomers who want riches on earth and riches in heaven without risking anything in between. But we must also wonder if those teachings aren’t why sociologists can no longer distinguish between the lifestyles of Christians and non-Christians.

You’re probably growing quite uncomfortable, perhaps angry, right about now. Good. Truth, with a capital “T,” has always comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. And God knows the American Church has gotten most comfortable. But before you dismiss my premise as the ranting of a religious fanatic, kindly do something for me. Ask yourself how spiritually and financially enriching the popular but simplistic “biblical” financial concepts have been.

In particular, ask yourself how enriching biblical teachings about debt have been to Christianity in general. Sure, anecdotally, a few people have been scared into paying their credit cards off. But during the eighties and nineties, the conservative Christian economic worldview was shaded by the belief that debt, particularly the federal debt, would prompt God’s immediate wrath on America. Even recently, the financial ministry most associated with shaping that worldview wrote in a study guide prepared for America’s largest denomination that: “Scripture clearly indicates that borrowing is not normal to God’s plan and was never intended to be used as a routine part of our financial planning.” Yet Moses clearly commanded his Jewish followers to freely lend among themselves (Dt 15:8) He established seventh year debt forgiveness (Dt 15:1) and termed it “evil” to refuse to lend because the year of forgiveness was near (Dt 15:9). Jesus even took time in the Sermon on the Mount to command his followers to freely lend to anyone in need, even if the loan wasn’t government guaranteed. Both clearly wanted borrowing and lending to be a routine part of the economy, even if the modern ministry doesn’t.

But ask a gathering of cultural Christians who’ve abused credit card debt how many have heard the biblical principle, “Neither a borrower nor lender be” and most will raise their hands. Their democratic gesture does not change the theological reality that they’re following Shakespeare rather than Moses and Jesus. Many of those same Christians believe, and have actually been taught by ministries to believe, that credit cards and the companies that issue them are evil. But credit cards make my ministry in business possible as I couldn’t make quick plane reservations or rent cars and hotel rooms without them. Shoot, some ministries actually accept those evil credit cards for donations. Some Christian publishers even accept them for books about the evils of credit card debt. Yes, the evil card issuers are making a profit by making all that possible. But the last time I looked, MBNA, the largest credit card issuer in America, was the fourth largest holding in a Christian mutual fund that was named for a biblical character associated with staying afloat. That may be appropriate as credit is an integral part of the abundant life.

A top executive of MBNA once chaired the board of a Christian ministry I serve. Despite being evil, he was a great friend and seemed to be a decent fellow back then. He always acknowledged that his marketing department could get as carried away tempting unsophisticated people as the marketing departments of ministries and publishers can. Yet his company often wrote off loans to Christians who defaulted for no reason other than they didn’t have the discipline to prudently use his product. Still, he was often demonized rather than appreciated for practicing a modern version of seventh year debt forgiveness. Ironically, the accumulated statistics of his acts of forgiveness are often cited by “Bible-believers” as evidence of how un-Godly America has become. Frankly, from a biblical perspective, I believe banks like MBNA might write off even more loans each year when debts become burdensome. In fact, I predict they will. Perhaps soon. But I’m not going to lose sleep over them acting biblically.

In summary, too many Christians have lost too much sleep and opportunities due to false prophets like the old Jim Bakker selling books rather than sharing the Gospel. Too many Christians have a confused worldview that comes from mixing cultural values with biblical virtues. The ancient prophets railed about this “syncretism” among God’s people far more than they railed at unbelievers. To begin Holy Week, Jesus whipped the money changers in the temple as he knew confused but self-righteous people unwittingly love money more than God and neighbor. I too wish there was an easy way to keep false prophets from devouring your spiritual and financial wealth. But Truth be told, there isn’t. The Bible, all of it, tells me so. So be most discerning when you hear the sound of locusts.

The political, religious and ethical opinions expressed by Gary Moore are not endorsed by National Planning Corporation (NPC).

Opinions voiced are not intended to provide specific investment advice and should not be construed as recommendations for any individual. To determine which investments or investment strategies may be appropriate for you, consult with your financial, tax or legal professional. Please remember that investment decisions should be based on an individual’s objectives, goals, time horizon, and tolerance for risk. Furthermore, any listing of a vendor or product does not constitute an endorsement or warranty of the vendor or product by NPC. NPC is not to be held responsible for and may not be held liable for the adequacy of the information available. The Financial Seminary and NPC are separate and unrelated companies.