Helen Rhee - Wealth, Business Activities, and Blurring of Christian Identity

While Christians formed their distinct socio-economic enclaves and koinonia in the second and third centuries, they have always been integrated into the larger Roman society.  Obviously, the more financially resourceful the members were, i.e., the middling group such as merchants, artisans, and skilled workers with their own businesses, and those in the upper rank of the society, now with a greater burden and responsibility to support the poorer members and clergy in their communities, the more integrated they were.  While honor, inheritance, power, property, and prestige—the usual building blocks that comprised one’s social standing and status in a larger society— were not supposed to work in the same manner in Christian communities, these were not simply to be rejected or given up as such since they, at least wealth and power, were useful in serving the Christian communities when properly controlled and channeled with right motivations.  This presented the very people with the greatest financial burdens a problem of maintaining their Christian identity while keeping their socio-economic standings, let alone aspiring upward social mobility.  The extant Christian texts are almost unanimous in disapproving and warning dangers of business affairs for they were thought to obscure Christian identity and responsibilities.  Early Christians consciously and intentionally constructed Christian self-definition revolving around the basic commercial and business dealings on individual, professional, and corporate levels.  By and large Christian texts were apprehensive about and negative toward businesses and trades since they were thought to compromise the Christian identity of those participating; these concerns and negativity were partly reflecting the general aristocratic attitude toward trade but especially due to idolatrous nature of avarice—insatiable desire for wealth—that was supposed to be behind all business affairs, as well as idolatrous aspects of business and commercial enterprises that were typically conducted in the pagan temples and under the names of pagan gods.  While Christian leaders recognized difficulties of separating their faithful from the ways in which the larger Greco-Roman society operated in a complex socio-economic and religio-political web of public activities, civic responsibilities, and social pressures, they nonetheless drew theologically unequivocal, though practically ambiguous, boundaries for Christians.  Despite their endeavors to sever the tie between Christian identity and business/trade, Christian businessmen/businesswomen apparently fused the two without much anxiety or misgivings in practice, enjoying the clientele of both Christians and non-Christians.