Male exhibitionist with moneybag, Domfront (Orne) France:
the sin of wealth leading to the sins of licentiousness and concupiscence.

In the Old Testament, the charging of interest by Israelites was forbidden to fellow-Israelites - but not to Gentiles. (Exodus XXII,25; Deuteronomy XXIII,19-20; Leviticus XXV, 36-37; Ezekiel XVIII,8; Psalm XV,5.) The authors of Deuteronomy desired remission of debts every seven years in order to prevent the debt-slavery which unfailingly accompanies usury.

While usury is not condemned as such in the New Testament, Jesus was obviously concerned about the exploitation of the poor by the rich, about continuing, crippling debt and its remission. Moneylenders and wealth are both condemned in the Gospels, and money itself denounced byJames and Timothy. The chief and most certain source is wealth is by lending money - whether to the poor or to 'entrepreneurs', 'venture capitalists' or to already-rich companies and corporations.

The early 'Church Fathers' condemned Usury as the opposite of Charity, Augustine regarded it as a crime, and the Council of Carthage banned it in 345 AD. The Third Lateran Council of 1179 denied moneylenders Christian burial.

In 1524 Martin Luther condemned usury as grossly contrary to God's Word - but just 20 years later, Calvin, the Whited Sepulchre of Geneva, started to write apologies for money-lending. From that point modern Capitalism began to take over the world.

Today, even 'Bible-based' Christians see nothing wrong with the charging of interest - which they would call making money make money. They continually and ever-more irrelevantly condemn private behaviour such as harmless homosexuality on the basis of dubious interpretation of very few texts, but conveniently ignore the prohibition of usury in both Old and New Testaments...

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