The Christian lives in a world that is almost entirely governed by the pursuit of material gain.  Governments that seemed untouchable have fallen because they could not deliver the material goods that their citizens coveted.  Nominal Christianity long ago forged an alliance with the powers of materialism.

The Catholic church maintained a teaching against usury for many centuries, but enterprising Catholics found ways to circumvent this teaching.  During the middle ages the Catholic church found it necessary to borrow at usury from Catholic bankers.  Calvin was the first of the Reformers to explicitly condone usury.  It was also Calvin who formulated the precepts by which much of modern Christendom enters wholeheartedly into the material realm in the name of stewardship.

Christians and non-Christians have struggled to find solutions to the mastery Mammon holds over mankind.  We are familiar with the oppression caused by attempts to implement Karl Marx’s ideal society.  The Protestant doctrine of stewardship is really not too much different from Marx’s teaching: Christians should strive to earn all they can, in order to be able to share with those who are in need.  Nor have the followers of the Reformers been notably more compassionate than the followers of Marx.  Protestants went about the business of colonialism, slavery and commerce in a more cold and calculating way than Catholics.  They believed that material prosperity was evidence of God’s favour.  This status made it only right and proper for the favoured group to determine how much the less favoured were entitled to share in material blessings.

Our Anabaptist and Mennonite forefathers never participated in such oppression because they had a different concept of the place of material things in the life of a Christian.  If our vision of the nature and danger of materialism is not altogether clear today, could it be that we have unknowingly absorbed much of the Protestant teaching about money and possessions?
In the New Testament epistles stewardship is only used in the sense of stewardship of the Gospel: 1 Peter 4:18, “As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.”; Titus 1:7, “For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre;”; 1 Corinthians 4:1 & 2, “Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God, Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful.”  These are the only passages in the epistles where the Greek word oikonomos is translated as steward.

In Romans 16:23 and Galatians 4:2 where the meaning is clearly a secular office the translators used chamberlain and governor.  Oikonomia, translated as stewardship in Luke 16, is translated four times in the epistles as dispensation: 1 Cor. 9:17, “a dispensation of the gospel is committed unto me”; Eph. 1:10, “the dispensation of the fulness of times”; Eph. 3:2, “the dispensation of the grace of God which is given me to you-ward”; Col. 1;25, “Whereof I am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God which is given to me for you, to fulfil the word of God”.