I have a William Lane Craig book I want to finish before I go on to anything new, but a review of a book come out in World Magazine this month that I really want to read. The book is titled Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West by Peter Brown. Here is the quote from Brown that piqued my interest:
Brown summarizes Augustine’s view that “pride, not wealth, was the true Last Enemy of the Christian. The real division of the world was not between the rich and the poor. It was between the proud and those who were enabled by God’s grace to be humble before God and before their fellows. … For once the rigid stance of pride was removed, wealth and power could be used without inhibition to promote the concord of a Christian society.”
Augustine, Brown notes, “was relentlessly even-handed in his treatment of the sins of both the rich and the poor.” Here’s what Augustine preached to the poor about whether the rich who were evil could get into heaven: “Certainly such people will not get in. But you too, just see whether you will enter. What if, as well as being poor you are greedy; what if you are both weighed down with want and on fire with avarice?”
This helped me realize that our recent exercise in voting and its result are nothing to celebrate. When people vote out of pride and narcissism, no one is well served.