About Debt and Sin: Biblical Economics

Many languages have the word debt identical to the word for sin or guilt. For example, the literal translation of the Lord's Prayer, which even many unbelievers know by heart, is “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”. While we are more accustomed to the standard translation “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”, in many other translations the Bible scholars have also adopted the economic terminology of debt and debtors (the Slovak, English, and of course German translations are like this).

The same wordplay can be seen in Aramaic, the language Jesus Christ is believed to have spoken. After all, Jesus used economic terminology almost constantly.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a widow who loses a coin, forgets everything else for a while, and searches hard for it (spoiler, the coin is you and me).

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a business owner who hires employees and then (uneconomically) pays them exactly the same daily wage, even though one worked all day and the last only worked an hour.

The kingdom of God is like a custodian who left his managers a sum of money and then turns on one of them for not doing anything with the gift entrusted to him, for not even letting it mature at the bank, and for burying his gifts in the ground.

A widow who donates a few coins to charity is more respected than a billionaire who donates millions, because the widow gives from what she does not have, whereas the rich man gives from his surplus. In other words, the widow gives relatively more of her wealth than the rich man.

In short, there are many similar parables where Jesus uses principles that today we would call economic principles.

After all, the whole principle of Christianity, that Jesus paid our debts (sins) for us, that he literally bought us back, is the key message of the whole gospel - the good news.

Imagine this: all the debts you've incurred in your lifetime, someone else will pay them for you. Someone who believes in you.

And that brings us to another interesting economic word that appears on almost every page of the Bible: credit. That word, which is used daily today as a synonym for money (a person has a credit card, credit is the amount of money in an account), means faith in Latin. The Catholic brothers and sisters repeat their creed, credit (from Latin credo - I believe), every Sunday.

How is money related to faith?

First of all, we must all collectively believe in money for it to be money at all. Money literally only works because everyone believes in it. We may not trust each other much, but we do trust money. After all, what would it look like if you walked into a shop and the butcher refused to give you a (valuable) ham for some (worthless) pieces of coloured paper with the words: "I don't believe in that money, I want something of value in exchange for the ham, like shoelaces or potatoes"?

Imagine how much more complex, trivial - and poorer - our society would have to be if there were no money, i.e. "money orders". For all your purchases, you would have to make or find something real yourself to exchange the items for. A society without faith in money would be much poorer and much more complex.

We take faith in money so automatically that we don't even realize it. We don't even realize that the word faith is found in both the word believe and the word believer. The creditor is your believer. The bank is your believer. The one who trusts you. The one who pays your bill for you in advance.

If money were to lose its credibility, its trust-worthiness, if it were no longer worthy of our trust at all, it would suddenly become a piece of paper as valuable as play-money from a game of Monopoly. The moment the game is over and the millions of dollars are again sitting in a box in the closet, it no longer has the magic bestowed by the nature of the game for the time the game is played.

Money is therefore something by which we have learned to technically deal with trust even between people who have never and will never see each other in their lives.

In what way is debt similar to sin?

Anyway, back to debt and sin. Sin is similar to debt in many senses. First, a person may acquire something to which - in the classical sense - he is not entitled. One who is burdened with debt can live, invest, or do business with money that is not his. And he can live and do business beyond his standards and financial means on debt.

Sin is similar to debt precisely in that one - for a while - lives beyond one's (moral or financial) entitlement. Only he will have to pay that debt someday.

Debt is also similar to sin in the way it is creepingly dangerous. When you take on debt, it always seems manageable. And then something happens, and the person is a slave to debt, a slave to sin from which there is no redemption. Unless he's lucky enough in life to have the faith that someone else will pay the debt for him.

This article was originally written for Hospodarske noviny, and published on September 22th, 2023.