Introduction

“Joseph Fletcher,” wrote Harvey Cox in 1968, “has been stimulating and annoying people for years.”[1] Author of the popular The Secular City, Cox knew a thing or two about “stimulating and annoying people.” He admired his Cambridge neighbor as a fellow provocateur. While Cox taught ethics at Harvard Divinity School, Fletcher (b.1905) was professor of social ethics at the nearby Episcopal Theological School. In an affectionate salute to Fletcher, Cox described him as someone well acquainted with the ways of the world. “He has worked, during his long life, as a coal miner, a laborer in a rope factory, a cathedral dean, a social worker and a college chaplain. He led his students onto picket lines and called down on himself the wrath of religious standpatters years before”[2] it became popular in the 1960s. His book – Situation Ethics:The New Morality – attracted a large audience and aroused spirited debate when it appeared in 1966. 

That same provocative spirit is immediately visible in the following document. Invited to give a paper at a National Council of Churches conference on stewardship in 1959, Joseph Fletcher strolled next door to the Harvard Divinity School library so that he could peruse Harvard’s extensive holdings on ethics and moral theology and learn from the great scholars about stewardship. The search turned up almost nothing. In fact, the only place where he could find any sustained attention to this topic was in the library section devoted to “the ‘promotional’ literature of church finance” where one frequently encountered a “moralistic insistence” on giving. The concept, he discovered, had “fallen into pettiness.”

So Joseph Fletcher set out to restore stewardship to its rightful place in the firmament of Christian ideas. It was an ambitious project. I doubt that he would have claimed that this paper was anything more than a point of departure for further conversations. As far as I can tell, however, the conversation did not take place immediately. That sort of far-ranging talk about stewardship came a generation later when the Canadian theologian, Douglas John Hall, set out to rescue this “antique” from the “theological attic.” During the 1980s and early 1990s Hall’s work – The Steward: a Biblical Symbol Comes of Age[3] – sparked the discussion that Fletcher had tried to jump start years earlier.

This essay reflects its time of conception. Shortly before Fletcher agreed to write the paper, he had just read the latest best-seller of another Cambridge neighbor, John Kenneth Galbraith. The Affluent Society[4] gave Fletcher the clues for re-interpreting stewardship in twentieth century America. “Our generation must be needled into facing the ominous gap between our private opulence and our public poverty! Closing this gap is the basic work of stewardship.[5]” Much of Fletcher’s analysis in this essay depended upon Galbraith’s description of the “private” and the “public,” – a distinction which later became prominent in mainline theology.

Like so much else in the common life of American Protestantism, the prevailing versions of stewardship seldom made any connections between the “private” and “public.” If Protestants aspired to a relevant witness in this fast changing world, they would support new taxation policies that would restore a proper balance between the two spheres. “The claims of neighbor love in the new world,” Fletcher concluded, “are cast in the much broader terms of the public good – terms too broad as yet for the imagination of many church people unless Christian stewards help them to grasp their meaning.”[6]

Fletcher’s wide angled vision of stewardship took in more territory than anybody since Harvey Calkins wrote in 1914. In fact, he “cast” his views in “terms” that are even now, some four decades after the essay appeared in print, “too broad for the imagination of many church people.” It would stretch many of us, for instance, to interpret the dog-eared slogan about “time, talents and treasure” as a plea for lobbying on behalf of increased taxes and more just welfare policies.

This provocatuer knew full well that he was pushing beyond the limits of conventional wisdom. Fletcher didn’t mind “annoying” church folk so long as it would help in “stimulating” them to re-think all that they had come to take for granted. His work continues. Much of what he wrote forty years ago can still encourage a powerful conversation among those willing to study this document.

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Source: Joseph Fletcher, “Wealth and Taxation: The Ethics of Stewardship,” Stewardship in Contemporary Theology, T.K. Thompson, Ed. (New York: Association Press, 1960).

Wealth and Taxation: The Ethics of Stewardship

I went back into the stacks of one of America's topflight theological libraries where they had arranged together all of the general works on Christian ethics and moral theology published in the last hundred years. I wanted to see how much attention had been paid to stewardship as a category of Christian concern and moral obligation. The search resulted in a nearly nil finding.

The Cupboard Was Bare

There were thirty-eight of these general surveys of Christian ideals and problems of conscience. There was not one single index reference to stewardship in thirty-five of the thirty-eight volumes. And of the three that did refer to it in the index, I found that there was only a single reference in each case. Furthermore, in only one of these three was there anything more than an incidental reference to the concept, only an incidental use of the term. In short, only one treatise on Christian ethics has even one paragraph on the subject of stewardship as such!

Of the most influential works – whether Protestant or Catholic – I found none that mentioned it. For example, there was none in Brunner's Divine Imperative; Beach and H. R. Niebuhr's selected readings from the tradition, Christian Ethics; Dorner's System of Christian Ethics(1887); Kirk's Some Principles of Moral Theology; Cronin's Science of Ethics; Reinhold Niebuhr's Interpretation of Christian Ethics; Mortimer's Elements of Moral Theology; Garvie's Christian Ideal for Human Society; Ramsey's Basic Christian Ethics; Henry Davis' Moral and Pastoral Theology; George Thomas' Christian Ethics and Moral Theology. The three books in which stewardship was mentioned at all are Protestant works – none Catholic.

What, then, of special treatments or narrower works dealing with economic problems in particular, such as the ethics of property or ownership? Here, as we might expect, the question of Christian stewardship receives some attention in nearly all of them. But – it must be noted – none of these Christian economic studies treats stewardship analytically or developmentally as a concept or category of Christian ethics, subject in any way to change or reconception according to changes in cultural context. It is always a high-order abstraction. And it is never discussed in relation to vocation, as I shall do in this chapter, in keeping with Dr. Carlson's thesis[7].

There is, of course, any amount of reference to it in the “promotional” literature of church finance and money raising for ecclesiastical enterprises. Yet even here the treatment is largely one of moralistic insistence on the individual's obligation to “share” his “good things” with his “less fortunate” neighbor as a “duty” owed to God who wills him to do so. This kind of rationale for stewardship is entirely familiar to most of us in the American religious-cultural pattern of both Protestant sectarianism and church Christianity, but its lack of depth and its moralism – as this paper attempts to show – may well account for its separation of stewardship from vocation, its neglect in serious works of basic Christian ethics, and the further fact of its total absence from any professional or technical works on fiscal policy, investment problems, business management, or economic theory in general. Finally, to drive the point home, there is even no reference whatsoever to stewardship in any standard work on business ethics – a negative fact which may seem to indicate how post-Christian is the shape of contemporary thought forms.

It is reasonable to suspect, therefore, that the concept has somehow been impoverished or lost its relevance, or (as I shall suggest) even fallen into pettiness.

The Concept: A Biblical Story

Concept forming is basic to all problem solving and decision making, including whether to share our resources with others, and if so, with whom and how much. Every ethical value judgment, every moral approval or disapproval, rests upon hidden or perceived pre-ethical considerations. Put slightly differently, there is a theological or philosophical frame of reference for every moral choice we make, every spiritual decision. For Christian ethics in particular there is certainly a primary dependence upon biblical bases, and of all the things that bear upon stewardship in the Bible there are three New Testament matters that I have chosen to highlight: the story of Ananias and Sapphira; what is said about “detachment” from “worldly goods” in the seventh chapter of First Corinthians; and the concept of “poverty” so much idealized in the Gospels.

Let's not be too squeamish about mooted matters. There is always some controversy over the Ananias-Sapphira story in Acts 5:1-11, even though it is hard to see how there can be any serious exegetical or hermeneutical debate possible. Ananias and Sapphira as members of the Christian fellowship, the koinonia, sold their property – as Barnabas and the others had sold theirs – to distribute it as a liquid asset “as any had need.” But then they kept back some of it, or as Kirsopp Lake said, “embezzled part of the price,” and when they were found out, Peter faced them with it and accused them of “lying” to or “tempting” the Holy Spirit. The radical solidarism of these early Christians, a fellowship in material as well as in spiritual resources – sometimes called “religious communism” – is plainly set out in the preceding verses, 4:34-37, as well as earlier in 2:44-45.

The Ananias-Sapphira story is clearly part of the whole section 4:34-5:11. I have heard and read commentaries in which it was contended that the fault of this man and woman was their dishonesty and not their selfishness. Frankly, I cannot imagine any contention any more vulnerable to ethical attack! In the first place, selfishness is sin in greater depth than deceit. Their crime was their cheating on the Holy Spirit – i.e., on the community of believers and sharers which was the Spirit's temple. Some will argue that Peter asked, “And after it was sold was it not at your disposal?” in order to suggest, “Was it not still up to your own choice whether to keep it or share it?” But he would have said so, in that case. What Peter's question meant, surely, was that after it had been sold it was disposable and dispersible. The man and his wife had violated the sharing principle – the story is not a moralistic tale about telling fibs! I agree heartily with George Bernard Shaw who said in his Farfetched Fables, “They let the narrative stand but taught that Ananias and Sapphira were executed for telling a lie and not for any economic misdemeanor. This view was impressed on me in my childhood. I now regard it as a much graver lie than that of Ananias.” Apart from describing their deaths as an “excecution,” Shaw has gone to the heart of the matter.

Detachment vs. Biblical Ethics

The second of the New Testament factors I would like to bring into view is the so-called “detachment” from “worldly” things in chapter seven of Paul's first letter to Corinth. The chapter as a whole sets forth a rather pragmatic view of sex, marriage, and divorce and is not aimed at all at the question of a balanced view of material and spiritual values. However, interspersed through it are three remarks which are quite often made to bear the weight of a somewhat Stoic-Manichean-Buddhist interpretation. They are: (1) verse 24, which asks “in whatever state each was called, there let him remain with God”; (2) verse 31, which asks those who “deal with the world” to act “as though they had no dealings with it”; and (3) the plea in verse 35 for their “undivided devotion to the Lord.” This indifference to things of the world, whether it be property, or status and role, is not in the least typical of the rest of the New Testament. Paul's apparent indifference here to material goods, to sex and marriage and reproduction – an indifference not found elsewhere – is apparently a prudent time-schedule preview of the immediate future and a desire to put first things first, in the belief (which he seems to have shucked off later) that the Kingdom was about to arrive as parousia at any moment. Indeed, he makes this apocalyptic eschatology quite explicit by warning in verse 20 that “the appointed time has grown very short” and in verse 31, “For the form of this world is passing away.”

Nowhere else in the Paul-letters do we find this combination of “detachment” and a parousian expectation. Indeed, it seems to be precisely in the combination that the explanation lies – i.e., without the belief that the world-order was about to be brought to an end, the detachment advice never shows itself. Since most of the rest of the New Testament takes history and the social process seriously, there is no consistent or coherent doctrine of detachment, not even implicitly. On the contrary, the biblical ethic takes material goods seriously, giving approval or disapproval according to their use and assigning no inherent or intrinsic value to them at all. None of the Persian dualism, making material things evil and false while holding spiritual things good and real, entered into the New Testament ethic. It was largely Hebraic in its assumptions about man and the world. The dictum “You must serve God or wealth: you cannot serve both” (see Matthew 6:24) is in no possible twist of meaning a detachment-saying; it points to the use and priority problem, not to wealth itself. Dualism only crept in later with Hellenistic influences, but that was considerably after New Testament times.

As in the Bible, so in church history. This is not to say that Christianity is without its own form of asceticism – but it is not dualistic and it is not antimaterial. In the first place, Christian ascetics soon ceased to be eremites or hermits, like St. Anthony in his cave and Simeon on his pillar, and joined together socially as cenobites or monks. Thus they forsook private or individualistic wealth, but wealth as such they certainly did not repudiate or condemn – only its greedy or exploitive uses were condemned. The monastery was a community enterprise in property and production. As social or corporate wealth, to be well shared, they endorsed worldly goods. Monastic "poverty" was personal poverty plus common wealth and social security! And in the second place, the most telling evidence that Christian asceticism was never “detachment” is found in the ethical character of Christian mysticism! Whereas oriental mystics have commonly sought to break the barrier of human limitations by some sort of cognitive or supermental purification, the Christians – even Meister Eckhart with his "disinterestedness" – have turned from the agnostic “way” and tried instead to achieve ethical purification, including a loving use of wealth rather than detachment from it. From this point of view it is necessary to challenge the opinion of Walter Meulder, in the symposium American Income and Its Uses (p. 317), that “detachment” and “non-possessiveness” are spiritual values which go with stewardship.

Poverty, Not Penury

The third and last of these New Testament matters is the notion of “poverty” which we find held up in such high esteem in the Beatitudes, and in various parables and numerous ethical sayings in the Gospels. Nevertheless, it is vital to understand that this is no mystique of non-possession, any more than Christian asceticism is a mystique of detachment! Not at all. We can see this in the parade of both good and bad rich men through the Gospels, and of poor men in both character-categories; sympathetic figures such as Zaccheus, Lazarus, and Joesph of Arimathea, all men of wealth, as well as unsympathetic rich men such as the one who wanted Jesus to divide an inheritance (Luke 12:13), and the one who let a beggar lie neglected at his gate (Luke 16:19-31). The story of the Rich Young Man (Mark 10:17-27) points at possessiveness, not at possessions, which is precisely the import of the saying about treasure and the “heart” in Matthew 6:21. 

Perhaps the simplest way to phrase it is to say that the gospel principle is poverty but not destitution – modest possessions but not penury or pennilessness. The Gospels do not distinguish the Haves from the Have-Nots but the Have-Too-Muches from the Have-Enoughs. The poverty they idealize means only a lack of luxuries, while destitution would be a lack of necessities. Jesus was of the poor, the modest, the minimum-income am haaretz. But Jesus was not one of the beggars. His people lived modestly but not desperately. St. Francis and the mendicant orders tried for a while to embrace destitution; it was not poverty, as Jesus proposed. Lady Poverty for the Franciscans was really Dame Destitution. Jacques Le Clerque, the Roman Catholic writer, who sees this vital distinction quite clearly, reminds us in his Christianity and Money (p. 56) that once when a friar was given some alms and saved it for future needs, St. Francis ordered him to throw it in the dung on the road. Obviously this deliberate pennilessness does not fit the dominical injunctions about laying gifts before the altar, making loans, giving good things to children, offering hospitality, teaching a careful use of possessions, tending one's flocks, feeding the hungry, the thirsty, and clothing the naked. Nor does it fit the advice to the rich in First Timothy (6:18-19) to be “liberal and generous” – but still without any hint that they should liquidate their possessions or impoverish themselves.

The ethical insight here is that, on the score of character, the possession of material goods has a kind of built-in danger that we will idolize them. Sometimes wealth corrupts its owners, and sometimes poverty produces piety! We also know, of course, that sometimes wealth is used by saintly people, and sometimes poverty produces aggression and greed. Poverty as distinct from destitution is therefore for some a privilege because it is spiritually safer, but the deeper ethical insight is that material wealth is a necessary means to loving the neighbor and an obligation of stewardship. The only issue is who is to have the “means” of wealth and to whom he is to minister it. If the factors of an ethical act are four – motive, end, means, and consequences – then the motive of “voluntary poverty” is self-surrender and, as such, a good one. But on the other three scores of end, means, and consequences, it is clear that the resources of neighbor love are radically reduced or subverted by the lack or rejection of material means.

It is an interesting observation that there is practically never any reference to the financial basis of Jesus’ ministry! This is partly due to a lack of attention to the question in the Gospel accounts, of course, even though it peeps through such episodes as the anointing at Bethany and the protests against the involved “waste” of three hundred denarii (Mark 14:3-9). The only reference seems to be in Luke's Gospel (8:1-3), but we are merely told that the disciples’ company was followed and subsidized by “some women” (e.g., Mary, Joanna, and Suzanna) “who provided for them out of their means.” Nevertheless, this in itself is a clear enough indication that Jesus knew that somebody has to foot the bills! Chuza was Herod's steward, in the sense of a functional role in a rich man’s service, but his wife Joanna in Jesus’ company was fulfilling the “stewardly” role on another level and in another way. She was not, like her husband, handling another man's wealth on his behalf; she was acting in faith as a steward of God on God's behalf.

The Christian Commonwealth

There is a rock-bottom difference between being stewards of wealth because it is God's and we are acting on his behalf, on the one hand, and being stewards of wealth because it is ours and we are acting on behalf of our own charity. I have already pointed out, in Christianity and Property (p. 186), how easily stewardship is perverted into a sub-Christian idea. The creationist doctrine is that “the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof” (1 Chronicles 29:14; Psalm 24:1), and therefore stewardship is on God's behalf – he is ultimately the only landlord or owner. Furthermore, God's creation – his material wealth – is, under the divine patrimonium of a heavenly father, provided for his children on earth on a familial basis, intended for all and not just for some. These principles of divine ownership (men have possession but not the ultimate title) and of social equity or “commonwealth” are fundamental in the Christian world-view. This is why almsgiving in Christian ethics and moral theology has always been treated under the heading of justice, not of mercy. In some measure, then, to give to a neighbor in need – to share with him – is actually giving him what is his own. We all have an inalienable equity in God's patrimony, so that contributing to a community fund or paying taxes for social security is not largesse or noblesse oblige but simple, obligatory stewardship.

The sub-Christian twist comes when we begin to think of our giving and sharing as our mercy to the less fortunate, instead of seeing that it is a stewardly handling of God's wealth to fulfill God's purposes. We are not our own stewards, being generous to our neighbors out of our greater wisdom and wealth; we are God's stewards, acting for God in the distribution of his wealth to his family on earth. There is no ground here for the hypocrisy or pretension of self-congratulation because we may be trying to share-the-wealth on one scale or another – for example, by one or more tenths. To grasp this point about the total claims of Christian stewardship, as against the notion of merely granting something out of our superfluity, makes it possible to see without confusion why stewardship is a “stewardship of ten tenths” as they express it in the Church of England's Christian Stewardship of Money (p. 30), and not a mere calculation of one tenth or "tithing." Tithing is a part but only a part of stewardship and it is definitely not the subject of this discussion. Any tendency to reduce stewardship to church tithes is a perversion of biblical theology.

As a concept or category of Christian faith, “stewardship” stands or falls with “vocation” – they go together like love and marriage. Stewardship does not stand alone, nor is it just a hyphenated conception. In a way, I should like to suggest, stewardship is, as vocation is, a synonym or equivalent term to what is meant by “the ministry of the laity.” It is a dimension of every Christian's ministry of work and witness in the world as we distinguish that ministry from the ordained ministry of the Word and sacraments. The lay ministry is our “vocational stewardship” of our talents, time, and money. Again, we might call it a “stewardly vocation,” for all of those who “having this ministry” are “ambassadors” – to use Paul's words for it in his second letter to Corinth (4:1 and 5:20). But the main point here is not that stewardship is vocation in the sense of being paired with it, but in the sense of being merged with it. Just as society has been guilty of separating work from vocation, so has the church been guilty of separating stewardship from vocation, as if it were something in addition to or alongside of our working role in the world!

Here then, using the language of present-day social analysis, is a role-definition of the Christian – a faith-proposition or a theological inference, in terms of personal obligation, from the doctrines of Creation, God's Sovereignty, Human Agency, the Incarnation, Sacramentalism, Redemption. In short, Christian economics is applied theology.

Consider the relevancies of these doctrines. A God of love who is a heavenly father creates (provides) for all without discrimination or favoritism – since a father provides for the weaker as much if not more than for the strong children. Being the Lord of his creation, the Landlord of Ultimate Title, whatever any of us holds by whatever rules of acquisition and ownership, we use under the Landlord's judgment. What we hold, we hold for him and administer only the usufruct, nothing more. His sovereign will obtains. It is both our glory and our humility that we are God's agents through whom he works out his plans and purposes in the world.

By becoming material and earthly himself – since the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us – all dualism between the material and spiritual is once and for all discredited. No longer may “religion” betray us into a false “spirituality” which regards the material goods and values of life, its economic assets, as somehow inferior or morally suspect. So, too, Christian sacramentalism continues to act out the “materialism” of the Incarnation by the ministration of spiritual grace through material, economic means – through bread and wine, as Christ ordered it. The Lord's table is as obvious as any denial could be of the material-spiritual dualism. It is, finally, through our re-employment of the material goods of the world, of the economic resources of the world, that God redeems his creation – through our use of his whole material order as a “sacramental” order. And thus it is, although expressed in only a few stark phrases, that the stewardship of our talents, time, and money – all three – is our vocation, the means or method by which the ministry of the laity (i.e., of the people of God) is fulfilled.

The Context: An Economics of Plenty

We have now indicated that the biblical ethic contains the principles of sharing – even in the radical, primitive version of the Jerusalem congregation, of concern for rather than detachment from material values, and of modest possessions or moderate wealth. However, we cannot elaborate such theological abstractions and high-order ideals without taking a very empirical and down-to-earth look at the concrete situation, at the living context in which our stewardship is to be excercised. In the contemporary milieu things in America are radically, almost unbelievably, advanced over the picture of even fifteen years ago. Our new “people's capitalism” has developed an “affluent society” far beyond the dreams of the past, and even beyond anything imagined by much of the world in our own day outside the North Atlantic community. Most of the classical concept-forming for the doctrine of Christian stewardship was carried out in the past era of widespread poverty in the agrarian and low-energy societies of the biblical and European worlds, not in the mid-twentieth century comparative opulence of America with its gross national product of over 375 billion dollars!

This is a new world we have, with a median family income of $4,000. We have moved from Scarcity to Plenty, even though there is still a lot of moving to be done!

As a result of ten or fifteen crucial technological “breakthroughs” in the last two hundred years, and the policy innovations and researches of business enterprise, combined with collective bargaining and corporate organization, we have an unprecedentedly high standard of living. All of this is being achieved with fewer and fewer so-called “productive workers” working at it. Managerial, professional, and technical employees already outnumber production-line workers. But we can also be sure that it is only a matter of time until the rest of the world catches up; its capital accumulation will grow as its technical organization grows. The United States and Canada just now have only 10 per cent of the world's people but they have 75 per cent of the world's income, while about 75 per cent of the world's people have only about 10 per cent of its income. Yet this won't remain the case. There is a dynamic movement everywhere abroad and its direction is toward the American standard.

This “Twentieth Century Capitalist Revolution,” as Berle called it, or “permanent revolution” in Russell Davenport's phrase, has come about through an empirical, non-doctrinaire, experimentalist mixture of both managed and competitive enterprise. The almost anarchic laissez faire of the classical Private Enterprise System has been modified in the last quarter-century by the corporation, as well as by Keynesian fiscal policy, graduated income tax, collective bargaining, and a host of other innovations in business management and practice. Most of our history has been one of poverty in both individuals and nations. The revolution in economic ideas has overthrown the Economics of Poverty as we can see it in Ricardo's gloomy “iron law of wages,” and Marx's reapplication of it in his prediction of the proletarianization of all but a shrinking group of capitalists at the top! These things simply have not happened. Our revolution in a non-ideological spirit has embraced the Economics of Plenty, and on the record has successfully ignored both orthodox capitalist and orthodox socialist doctrine. We cannot continue to think any longer in the scarcity terms of pretechnical culture, and one of the major Christian categories to be shaken by the new milieu of the post-modern era is stewardship.

An “affluent society” – so John Galbraith names it in the title of his important book – presents new problems for stewardship. Peter Drucker has put his finger on one of them in his Landmarks of Tomorrow when he says, quite correctly, that although the “poor” have not disappeared, they no longer represent the “masses” – rather “they constitute isolated special-problem groups.” He refers to hard-core poverty-groups that suffer from discrimination, such as racial minorities like the Puerto Ricans, Negroes, Indians, and Mexicans; to scattered groups of small farmers on worn-out submarginal land; to old people or widows with children. These are for the most part non-employables, either through prejudice, accident, or debility.

This is no attempt, by any means, to make believe that the poor are no longer with us – that there are no neighbors who need our help. We cannot rely on the old trick, “Close your eyes and the bad thing will go away.” Harry Emerson Fosdick used to say that “the basic test of any society is what happens to the underdog,” and that still applies because we still have underdogs. The achievements of a high-energy economy must not blind us to the continued presence of claims upon us for stewardship in terms of physical human needs, as well – as we shall see – as broader social and cultural needs in the fields of public health, education, the arts, and similar common “goods” which can only be met by a stewardly concern for them and willingness to pay the necessary freight!

Organization and Stewardship Ethics

If this paper has any central thesis it is this – that Christian stewardship must keep step with the collective structures and the increasing “organization” of modern society. Technology raises the standard of living, and also technology has a built-in principle of organization. Technology's division of labor and necessary interdependence creates more and more association: associated work, management, marketing, entertainment, policing, government–associated everything. Kenneth Boulding rightly calls it the “organizational revolution.” Prosperity and organization go together. Individual small-scale production, marketing, and ownership management are being replaced by corporate enterprise. The same will have to become true of stewardship; it cannot remain a private, small-scale, individualistic affair – in the form of purely voluntary and private “tithing” or anything of that kind. Post-modern man is going to have to exercise his stewardship, his social use of wealth, in forms that fit the way he gets it – i.e., in social planning and public welfare, in corporate or community giving. In a way this will be returning from modern individualistic attitudes and mores to the essentially social or corporate character of stewardship at its biblical source in the Old Testament – when it was a “role” assigned to and accepted by the whole covenant-community of Israel, and not a private or individual election. We appear to have forgotten that the tithing of biblical stewardship was neither merely voluntary and spontaneous, nor solely an ecclesiastical “contribution.” On the contrary, biblical sharing was a matter of the law of the whole “secular” community, and the tithe was used for vastly more than “church” costs – it was a stewardly support of all the things that the modern, non-theocratic government has to do! In the spectrum of stewardship, ecclesiastical claims upon us are only a small part, one sector only!

I have already indicated that even though the destitute are by now only a marginal claim on our stewardship, there are other claims and other human needs – for health, for education, for the arts and the spiritual life, even for simple beauty. Our generation must be needled into facing the ominous gap between our private opulence and our public poverty! Closing this gap is the basic task of stewardship. Christian stewardship has the crucial task of witnessing to the dangerous imbalances of opulence. For example, more automobiles create more highways, call for more engineers and maintenance workers, scarify more green countryside, require more policing and planning, maim more people and increase the demands upon already overburdened hospital facilities. Increased private consumption increases public costs and adds to public needs. These new costs created by the increase in our private or personal wealth are all, in their nature, in public facilities. Stewardship – a redemptive, creative use of wealth as God's agents would use it – has to come to grips with the post-modern situation. And to use Galbraith's neat analysis, the social balance between private goods and services and public goods and services will have to be established by an investment balance between investing in material goods and investing in human and cultural values – in things like smoke abatement, urban renewal, the battle against juvenile delinquency, reforestation, educational grants and scholarships, arts centers, church support, scientific research. The agenda will be constantly lengthened and revised.

Galbraith speaks of small-scale patchwork devices in economic and management practice as “microeconomic,” and pleads for “macroeconomic” procedures adequate to the importance and dimension of our modern needs. Using his neologism slightly turned, I would claim that to think of stewardship in terms of individual giving to human needs, straight from the private pocket or wallet, is micro-ethics; whereas to see stewardship in terms of Christian support for increased taxation and funding, aimed at a wholesome investment balance and socially sensitive social balance – this would be macro-ethics! It would be true social ethics. This would be stewardship reconceived in its new economic context. Admittedly it wouldn't be easy – we shall have to contend against the “conventional wisdom” of the superseded medieval and modern eras in which taxation was a dirty word. The hatred of taxes is something we inherit from the past ages of scarcity when want and famine always hovered, and often it was the rich who greedily taxed the poor. This prejudice is out of date; we will have to outgrow it. For stewardship is taxation, local or federal, whether as a voluntary discipline privately exercised or a corporate and civil matter. Stewardship, vocation, and Christian citizenship coincide.

Christian stewardship confronts more than mere anachronistic hatred of taxation, which never seems to abate, even though it is plain that Democrats and Republicans alike increase tax rates and at the same time raise both the national debt and its legal limit. Stewardship also has to wrestle with blocked thinking, of which the basic block may be the myth of production – the fixed notion that production is the central and vital economic problem – perfectly true in the Scarcity Era but not in this Plenty Era when the main question is distribution! And distribution is, of course, the question of stewardship.

Our preoccupation with producing wealth, inherited from the Scarcity Era of the past, has the psychological effect of focusing our values in material goods. We slide steadily into a greedy consumerism. There seems to be no limit to the assumed need for production of consumer goods, to the disregard of the social balance between private and public needs, between material and cultural investments. Could it be that because we can supply consumer needs with a work force far below the level of “full employment,” we are caught in an orgy of consumerism to stave off unemployment? A real question of macro-economics and macro-ethics is how we can be stewardly enough to solve the problem of distributing purchasing power in creative ways other than salaries and wages paid out for goods-production! As the productivity of automated manufacture and work proceeds, this becomes crucial. At present we are still depending on material things alone for prosperity, and therefore we are having to create demand by creating desires. Of the basic economic roles today, the persuaders are almost kingpin among the owners, managers, makers, fixers, and users. High-pressure advertising is becoming a form of forced feeding!

The Threat of Sheer Greed

Vance Packard speaks in his Hidden Persuaders (p. 262) of “the larger question of where our economy is taking us under the pressures of consumerism. That, too, is a moral question. In fact I suspect it is destined to become one of the great moral issues of our times.” And he is right. High-pressure advertising, want-creation, is the powerful foe of the investment balance that stewardship must somehow establish. The challenge of stewardship boils down to whether it can alter the prevailing value system and change the high-order goal from consumption of material things to their most redemptive use. Think upon Galbraith's sharp remark: “In a free market, in an age of endemic inflation, it is unquestionably more rewarding, in pecuniary terms, to be a speculator or a prostitute than a teacher, a preacher or policeman. Such is what the conventional wisdom calls the structure of incentives.”

Let's put it this way. Christian stewardship faces us with a “success” problem – i.e., we have learned how to overcome the historic evil of naked need. But now we have to learn how to handle our opulence. Maynard Keynes foresaw that our real problem was not the production of enough goods, but the production of peace and the restriction of population. Yet in stewardship terms he underestimated the success problem, the question whether we will be able to do something constructive with our plenty. He did not illuminate the issue of the social and investment balances. We are still in the old consumer mentality. To quote Galbraith only once more, we have managed in our affluent society to “transfer the sense of urgency in meeting consumer need that once was felt in a world where production meant more food for the hungry, more clothing for the cold, and more houses for the homeless to a world where increased output satisfies the craving for more elegant automobiles, more exotic food, more erotic clothing, more elaborate entertainment – indeed, for the entire modern range of sensuous, edifying and lethal desires.”

This is the point at which the schools and churches must function – to reconceive and reinterpret the value system and priorities of the economics of opulence. Without some such ethical reorientation in our culture we are headed for a disastrous imbalance between material and moral values, and between private and public needs. And the practical issue is whether we are prepared to go along with a taxation on our opulence, public or private or a combination of both, which will redress the balance. The sales tax principle, whether self-imposed or a civil measure, with its automatic private-public balance of investment, seems about the only quantitatively adequate way to instrument the principle of stewardship. The sales tax policy automatically strikes the social balance and investment balance at the point of private consumption, just as the graduated income tax applies the principle of “ability to pay” to the distribution of the costs of public administration. To date, local use of the sales tax has been too primitive and unfair to lower-income groups. It can be refined by freeing basic necessities, “graduating” it to balance as between a Ford and a Cadillac, and other such adjustments.

Now, in this post-modern world emerging without as yet a name, those of us who are serious about stewardship at the "macro-ethical" level will need to consider a policy based on the sales tax principle (combined, of course, with the graduated income tax and others such as excise and import). Private self-taxation at the level of grace, as in tithing, is too little and too spotty. While Christian people will certainly fulfill love's call to share and avoid indulgence, it is necessary to administer stewardship also at the level of law, as a civil or social discipline. Wealth so corporately produced and enjoyed must be corporately tithed.

Conclusion: A New Economy, A New Ethic

All of this can be put bluntly in the question: “How is Christian stewardship to be reconceived and reoriented in an economy which has succeeded in shifting from scarcity to plenty?” My answer is also, on reconsideration, a simple one: “Let Christians who seek to work out their ministry in the economic world, who want to fulfill their vocation of stewardship, face the facts of the new era and follow the realistic policy of a social remedy for the social ills of opulence."

Thanksgiving baskets and Christmas coal bags are gone with the horse and buggy. There are always a few hardcore underdogs, yes, and alert public as well as private volunteer agencies will always be on hand to help. But the work done by the churches and the money given by the churches will always be a drop in the bucket. The claims of neighbor love in the new world are cast in the much broader terms of the public good – terms too broad as yet for the imagination of many church people unless Christian stewards help them to grasp their meaning. This is the high hurdle of social understanding (i.e., stewardship realism) in a high-energy, large-scale, organization economy. The new economy needs desperately to be buttressed by an organization ethic. We cannot fulfill our stewardship any longer in the outmoded terms of scarcity or by any classical policy of sharing on a private-offering basis. The human needs that cry aloud for stewardship are on the social scale and require socially structured and socially administered forms of response – chiefly, I suggest, a tax on opulence. Anything less than this is micro-ethics, petty moralism.

Source: Joseph Fletcher, "Wealth and Taxation: The Ethics of Stewardship," Stewardship in Contemporary Theology, T.K. Thompson, Ed. (New York: Association Press, 1960).

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[1] Harvey Cox, “Introduction and Perspective,” The Situation Ethics Debate, Harvey Cox, ed. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1968), p. 10.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Douglas John Hall, The Steward: A Biblical Symbol Comes of Age (New York: Friendship Press for Commission on Stewardship, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1982).

[4] John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958).

[5] Document # 16, p. 450.

[6] Document # 16, p. 456.

[7] Edgar M. Carlson, “ Stewardship and Christian Vocation,” Stewardship in Contemporary Theology, T. K. Thompson,  ed. (New York: Association Press, 1960).