In Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a sketch follows a man looking to purchase a session of argument. The interlocutor in the first room he enters instead unfurls a finely-crafted line of abuse. Startled, he exclaims, “Look, I came here for an argument!” This mirrors a common experience in my life: looking for a collegial, if spirited, argument exploring the ethics of finance within the capacious moral realities of Christ, I often find myself in adversarial, if polite, and muddled conflict. The biggest obstacle to the fruitful argument I seek is a fragmented discourse. Despite the many Christian voices addressing finance and investing, a definite lack of shared theological concepts and moral categories prevails. Without general agreement on finance’s purpose and place, the Christian discourse on the ethics of finance seems stuck, unable to move further into God’s vision for this important field.

A way out of this conundrum is storytelling. Storytelling facilitates shared exploration, bypasses certain ready objections, and surfaces underlying agreement. It brings us alongside one another and provides tools to work out ideas in new ways. With this conviction in mind, I’d like to ruminate on Joseph’s life as told in Genesis. I’m convinced this story is about finance. Further, I believe it provides powerful theological resources for conceptually provisioning and enriching Christian arguments on the ethics of finance. To start, however, I’ll tell how I came to understand finance in light of Joseph.

NYC’s Center for Faith & Work and a Curious Acronym

In 2011, I returned to finance after a three-year break to attend seminary in the financial crisis’s aftermath. I did not expect my new theological knowledge to impact my work. But this changed one Sunday while attending Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church. That night a pew mate told me of a class called “Faith and Finance,” aimed at Christian finance professionals, at the church’s Center for Faith & Work. Intrigued, I enrolled. The course suggested finance should be uprooted from the economic self-interest and rationality taught in business schools and grounded instead in Christ. In Christ, the foundations of work in finance included: (i) human beings are made in the image of a working God, (ii) the world’s ecology has moral realities as beautiful and knowable through wisdom as its physical complexities, and (iii) the world’s ultimate story is one of renewal through Jesus Christ. More briefly, the course asserted the imago Dei, the sapientia Dei, and the missio Dei (the image, wisdom and mission of God, respectively) were rich enough to reconceptualize finance.

The following spring, I served a private equity concern, the TZP Group, whose unique name helped connect the class’s core tenets to finance. The acronym “TZP” combines the Hebrew letters TZadeh and Peh and refers to the name the Pharaoh gave Joseph in Genesis 41:45, Tzaphenath-peneah, variously translated as “the revealer of secrets” (in Hebrew) or “God speaks and he lives” (in the Egyptian tongue of the time). TZP views Joseph as a model investor. Indeed, consider how Joseph draws on deep insights and discipline to wisely build and deploy capital (grain) in a manner fitting to time and circumstance and thereby creates tremendous social and financial returns. Also relevant is his mode of investing, how he partners with the farmers in Genesis 47, sharing in both their successes and risks. Seeing Joseph as an investor converted the abstract principles of the Faith and Finance class into concepts illuminating finance. Here was a financier enacting his identity as an imago Dei, drawing upon the sapientia Dei, and participating in a partial unveiling of the missio Dei, all the while never turning away from the work of finance. The next three sections will explore how these concepts, illuminated through the story of Joseph, can resource the Christian discourse on the ethics of finance.

Joseph and the Potential of Humans Living Into the Imago Dei

Joseph portrays the potential of humanity’s given identity as creatures made in the image of God. Genesis, of course, opens with God at work in creation. God fashions humans in the imago Dei to localize his beneficent authority on earth and continue his work as vice-regents. Humanity’s royal identity involves serving under and mediating a higher, ultimate authority. It is explained in the commissions God gives in Genesis 1 and 2.

The first commission is the two-fold blessing in Genesis 1:28 for fruitfulness and work. This blessing first envisions a staggering fecundity in bearing offspring and building civilizations (by echoing the blessing given to the fish in verse 22, God indicates that humans will fill the earth like the fish fill the seas … imagine!). Next, the language of “subdue [the earth] and have dominion” brings into view non-violent and mutual cultural creation and administration in human work. In this undertaking, humanity is to imitate God’s work as an artisan, developing the world with wisdom and making it a habitable dwelling fit for abundant life for all creatures.¹ The second commission is in Genesis 2:15. Here, after planting a garden to address the lack of fruitfulness on the earth, God hands the garden to humanity, charging them to “work it and keep it.” This work involves stewarding the garden, protecting and serving the overflow of life it both produces and makes possible. These commissions set forth a model for all human work, including finance.

The closing chapters of Genesis depict Joseph as exhibiting aspects of humanity’s calling as imago Dei. First, Joseph’s story opens with two dreams indicating his royal destiny. He will one day reign. Yet Joseph only ever realizes this given purpose as a servant, first in Potiphar’s household, then in prison, and lastly and astonishingly, over all of Egypt. In each of these roles, Joseph acts as one serving under a higher, ultimate authority, as a vice-regent rather than a regent.

Next, as a ruling servant, Joseph mediates God’s presence. Repeatedly, Genesis emphasises that God is with Joseph (Gen 39:2–6, 21–23), but this is never for Joseph’s good only. Rather, through his ruling and administrative work, Joseph mediates the blessing of God to others, including Potiphar’s household, the prison, and all of Egypt and the surrounding nations.

Thirdly, Joseph’s work facilitates fruitfulness. Only under Joseph’s care does Genesis observe that Abraham’s family was “fruitful and multiplied” and exceedingly so (47:27). Under this ruling servant, this imago Dei, God’s promise of fruitfulness becomes a reality and while childbirth is especially noted, it is fair to assume that the broader civilizational ordering needed for families and communities to truly thrive is envisioned.

Lastly, Genesis shows Joseph creating and administering structures for abundant cultural life, in both household, institutional, and national economies. Reflecting on this work in Genesis 50:20, Joseph notes that it resulted in many people being kept alive, saved from the famine.

Seeing Genesis depict Joseph as a concrete instance of the imago Dei suggests a broad vision for the work of finance. It suggests finance might expand its aims far beyond its present primary concern with return on investment and risk management to also include participation in and facilitation of a world full of the blessing of God through the work of humanity. Investing, cast in this light, is properly oriented first to protecting and serving households and towns full of men, women, and children, cultivating and deploying their giftedness in service of each other and for the goodness of all creaturely existence. Yet Joseph’s story does not only suggest a new purpose for finance, it also suggests a new method, namely wisdom.

Joseph and the Potential of Human Embrace of the Sapientia Dei

As an imago Dei, Joseph primarily mediates the blessings of God through a right fear of the LORD that embraces the sapientia Dei. Explicitly, we first hear of Joseph’s fear of the LORD in his encounter with Potiphar’s wife. There, Joseph characterizes her proposed illicit coupling as primarily a “sin against God” (39:9). This is a glimpse into Joseph’s heart: at his core, he attends first to awe of God. This deep wonder at and awareness of God sounds again when Joseph responds to Pharaoh’s flattery with, “It is not in me; God will give Pharaoh a truthful [or favourable] answer” (41:16). While Joseph speaks in Genesis 41 without any intervening dream or vision giving him God’s revelation (as occurs in Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, for instance), he conveys his firm conviction that his wisdom is ultimately a faculty of God, a creaturely conduit of the true, good, and beautiful.

Implicitly, the story portrays Joseph as refracting God’s wisdom, a pattern found in Proverbs 24:3–4. These verses depict the human coordination of wisdom, understanding and knowledge in fruitful work as drawing upon the modes and means of God by echoing, in structure and vocabulary, a depiction of God at work in creation in Proverbs 3:19–20. Human work done well is rooted in imaging God’s wisdom. The sapientia Dei is the interpretive frame for understanding Joseph’s work. Just as in Genesis 1 God forms and fills the cosmos with life by wisdom, “carefully constructing an artful world according to a well-thought-out plan for the benefit of creatures,” so Joseph in harmony with the sapientia Dei designs and executes economic structures for accumulating stores of grain and uses them to preserve life.² These proverbs put forth wisdom as a concrete way of life that inheres in the world, a real and objective moral ecology that gives identity and purpose to things and actions – including finance –and defines and orders their relationships with one another. This reality reverberates down through history and is the backdrop against which all human action sounds in either harmony or discord.

Whereas the imago Dei suggests a larger purpose for finance, the sapientia Dei suggests Christian thinking has resources sufficient to inform its complexities. The various components of finance, the relationships, trust, risk, value, time, intermediation, etc., that combine in various ways in finance’s functions all exist within this wisdom of God that animates creation’s objective moral ecology: knowledge of finance’s true purposes and possibilities, even in the specifics, is accessible to those fearing the LORD and drawing on God’s wisdom. Joseph’s reliance on the sapientia Dei allows his work to partially unfold the missio Dei in his time.

Joseph and the Potential of Human Participation in the Missio Dei

Joseph as imago Dei mediates God’s mercy and justice and so participates in the missio Dei, that mission to bless the world through Abraham’s family that God first articulates in Genesis 12 and finally fulfils in Jesus. This participation is evident in his treatment of the starving farmers in Genesis 47.³

The arbitrary use of state power is a consistent source of injustice in human history. Land seizure and expropriative tax rates are two tools often wielded in this abuse of power. Scholars suggest tax rates of 50% – 66% on a farm’s yield were common in ancient times and that lending seed for planting often bore a 33% charge.⁴ We can also note that property rights are only ever what is granted by the powers that be, such that “owning” one’s land is a concept relative to time, place, and policy. It is useful to read Joseph’s interaction with the farmers in light of these particular threats to human flourishing.
When the farmers, broke and starving, offer their land and bodies in exchange for food and seed, Joseph accepts the proposal, but in modified form. Instead of an unlimited servitude, Joseph institutes by law that the people will work the land and give 20% of the yield to Pharaoh (47:23–26). This law had the same force as those protecting the allotment of the priests.Matthews, Genesis, 860. In this act, Joseph delimits, in his time and place, the unlimited arbitrary power of the state, the same power by which Joseph’s original 20% [additional?] tax on crops was so easily implemented in Genesis 41. This structure of ownership, with its modest yield/taxation dependent on the quality and quantity of each year’s crop, means the owner/state is participating in the farmer’s work and its risks. Here is an ownership that unifies rather than alienates. This stands in contrast to a fixed yield that leaves all risks with the farmer. It is no wonder that the people gladly accept his terms (47:25).

In this part of Joseph’s story, there is a hope that work in finance can participate in the design and implementation of structures for the unfolding of justice and shalom in our time and place, even if these incremental improvements eventually pass away (one notes that Joseph’s reforms give way to brutal enslavement of the Hebrews by the opening of Exodus).

Further Up and Further In

The story of Joseph, read as a story of finance (albeit in ancient form), shows the potential for human work in this field. Finance, expressing the imago Dei, can explore an expansive vision of its service and authority and aim to participate in and facilitate human cultivation and deployment of giftedness for the good of all creation. Drawing on the sapientia Dei, finance can navigate the moral contours of its complex work. Embracing the missio Dei, finance can learn to wield its power with deference and restraint to build societies more resonant with justice.

Storytelling only gets us so far, of course. Yet, the theological tools on display in Joseph’s story, if applied to finance expansively, can do the detailed work and forge the requisite common concepts. As we move further up and further into the image, wisdom and mission of God we will draw nearer to that vision of finance residing in the mind of God.

Ben Nicka is an accountant and student of theology and an Associate Fellow of the KLC.