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There’s a serious trust deficit in our financial markets and it’s going to take a lot of fiscal tinkering, government pushing, banking reform just to make up for this deficit. Think Bernie Madoff, whose entire investment management company was a gigantic Ponzi scheme. He would take money from new investors to pay off old investors and convince them they were getting steady returns every month on their accounts. It all came to an end not because of some investigation but because Bernie ran out of money. Trust is at once precious and precarious, foundational but fragile. Strike out Madoff, you say. Is there a lesson to be gleaned from all this and what does the Bible say about good stewardship?
In the Bible, the word “steward” suggests a servant or an official given charge over God’s house. God’s “house” is the world and all that is in it and we are His caretakers. Of all the things of which we are stewards, money gets a lot of Bible attention. Other things of which we are stewards include our bodies (1 Cor. 6:19), our talents (1 Pet. 4:10), the earth (Gen. 2:15), and the gospel (1 Cor. 4:1).
In 1 Corinthians, Paul reminds a dissenting fraction of the Corinthian Church about the need to be Christ’s stewards entrusted with the mysteries of God (4:1). He told the Corinthians that he had come to them “in weakness and in fear and in much trembling” so the church would know the power of the Gospel rather than the power of Paul (1 Cor. 2:3). While he spoke in terms of planting and building, he now uses an interesting metaphor: Stewards of the mysteries of God. He wants to make his accountability clear: He is not a mere servant to the Christian congregation but a servant of Christ and a steward of the mysteries of God.
What are the conditions for trustworthy stewardship? 1 Peter explains how we need hearts of love, purity, obedience, and zeal. 1 Cor. 4:2 says “those who have been given a trust must prove faithful”. In the financial world, trust is the social capital that permits private capital to be exchanged, contracts to be enforced, promises to be kept, and expectations to be realized. Our role is that of a servant or a steward, not a ruler or owner. Stewards are to be found faithful. How can we be faithful to this charge? How will our faithfulness be measured? Even as we witness frauds perpetrated by custodians of billion-dollar funds, it is timely to remember that good stewardship has to be trustworthy stewardship.
