Christianity Today October 9, 2026 9 min signal 2026-10-09

The sin the church forgot

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Christianity Today

October 9, 2026

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Christians know well the biblical commands to be in the world but not of it (John 17:15–18) and to be conformed to God’s will rather than the pattern of fallen humanity (Rom. 12:1–2). Yet distinguishing what Scripture teaches from the influence of our surroundings is often more difficult than we realize—particularly in conversations about sin.

Though they’re not always framed in these terms, many of the most difficult questions of our day, both inside and outside the church, are basically about what is and isn’t sinful. Sometimes the tension is easy to see, as in conversations around sexual ethics, abuse, or abortion. But other times, we unthinkingly accept the assumptions of secular society, forgetting how the Bible speaks of a behavior.

One such silent sin is usury, a practice that was roundly condemned for the first 1,500 years of the church but now is widely practiced virtually without comment.

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Usury has to do with charging interest when lending money. You’ve likely heard it explained as the charging of excessive interest: The Hebrew word neshekh, found in the majority of the Old Testament passages I’ll quote below, literally means “a bite” or “biting” and is interpreted by some to relate to only this kind of interest.

But my contention is that usury is not so narrowly defined. The word comes from the Latin usura, simply meaning “use”—as in, the using of money to create more money for oneself. In texts from ancient Rome and the earliest years of the church, usury and charging interest are typically not distinguished but are synonymous.

Of course, modern economies are built on charging interest. Adam Smith, the forefather of the modern free-market system, explains and endorses the practice in his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. A loan gives the opportunity of profit to the borrower, he writes, so the lender should be compensated for shouldering the risk.

Smith’s work and others like it led to the acceptance of interest in the marketplace, and the meaning of usury shifted to its narrower, modern understanding. But the understanding in Scripture—and the vast majority of church history—did not change.

The biblical text, especially the Old Testament, is replete with prohibitions of usury. In fact, it is one of the few sins that is explicitly condemned in all three sections of the Hebrew Bible. The core prohibitions, as one would expect, occur in the Torah. Deuteronomy 23:19 rejects usury within the community, saying, “Do not charge a fellow Israelite interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest.” (The next verse does allow charging interest on loans to foreigners.) Exodus 22:25 and Leviticus 25:35–37 express similar instructions, including the prohibition of interest on the poor or vulnerable.

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Psalm 15 similarly tells us that the “blameless” one who may “live on [God’s] holy mountain” is the one who “lends money to the poor without interest” (vv. 2, 1, 5). The prophet Ezekiel describes “a righteous man” in the same way (18:5, 8, 17). And Proverbs 28:8 says, “Whoever increases wealth by taking interest or profit from the poor amasses it for another.”

Nehemiah intensifies the language, issuing this command as returning exiles prepare to resettle Jerusalem:

You are charging your own people interest! … What you are doing is not right. Shouldn’t you walk in the fear of our God to avoid the reproach of our Gentile enemies?I and my brothers and my men are also lending the people money and grain. But let us stop charging interest!Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves and houses, and also the interest you are charging them—one percent of the money, grain, new wine and olive oil. (5:7, 9–11)

Evidently, even a 1 percent interest rate was unacceptable to Nehemiah for his fellow Israelites.

While the New Testament does not address usury as frequently as the Old Testament does, Luke’s Gospel sheds light on how Jesus interprets these prohibitions. In Luke 6, Jesus famously describes how to love our enemies:

And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. (vv. 34–35)

This is essential. Jesus is not only speaking about charity or being defrauded here. In fact, many biblical scholars argue that Jesus is simultaneously addressing two issues. The first is the Greco-Roman practice of loans in exchange for favor, and the second is the charging of interest. In both cases, Jesus denounces lending as a means to “get anything back,” be it patronage, favor, or wealth.

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As New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson puts it, “As in [the Sermon on the Mount], but with a different set of symbols, Luke has Jesus demand of his followers a standard for human relationships that involves a ‘going beyond’ or ‘more’ than the norm of reciprocity.” While the Old Testament prohibits lending at interest to fellow Israelites and the poor, Jesus outright condemns trying to get anything out of anyone, even your enemies.

As the church father Jerome says of this passage:

But see the progression: In the beginning of the Law, interest is only forbidden among brothers; in the prophets, usury is prohibited for everyone, as Ezekiel says: ‘He who does not give his money to interest.’ Furthermore, in the Gospel, there is an increase in virtue, with the Lord commanding: ‘Lend to those from whom you do not expect to receive’ (Luke 6:35).

For most of church history, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to Martin Luther, Christians have been remarkably unified in this understanding. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the church was not alone in this ban. The great Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle similarly believed in the sterility of money, which is that money itself cannot generate more money. Clement of Alexandria understood the command of Deuteronomy 23 against usury to apply to all humanity. The Cappadocian Fathers condemned the practice, and Augustine, reflecting on Psalm 129, writes, “Lend not money at interest.” The Council of Nicaeacommanded deposing clergy found to have practiced usury.

As David Jones summarizes in Reforming the Morality of Usury, “All of the Church Fathers who addressed lending money at interest viewed the Old Testament prohibitions of the practice as still binding, without exception.”

The same standard was held through the medieval period—though, notoriously, this time also saw antisemitic laws in much of Europe limiting Jewish people’s rights and freedoms and pushing them toward banking as a trade. That came to include lending money, and the Christian ban on usury was misused to reinforce antisemitism even as some Christians availed themselves of loans from Jewish bankers.

Still, it is possible to distinguish the theological principle from that injustice. In his Summa Theologica, for instance, Aquinas writes, “To take usury for money lent is unjust in itself, because this is to sell what does not exist, and this evidently leads to inequality which is contrary to justice.” Aquinas demonstrates the blending of Greek philosophical thought (the sterility of money) and the biblical concern of economic justice.

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The same view held through the Protestant Reformation, at least for a while. Luther was a frequent critic of usury, largely upholding the traditional understanding of the practice and the teachings of the church fathers.

It was not until the influence of John Calvin, alongside rapid economic changes in Europe, that thinking around usury began to shift. Calvin was the first to distinguish between what he called “commercial” interest and “biting” usury. Intentionally or not, this distinction contributed to the widespread adoption of interest-based economic practices in turbulent 17th-century Europe. And in that span, 1,500 years of Christian interpretation collapsed, so much so that usury is now a little-known term for an accepted part of everyday life.

Is this to say that the credit card user, the home mortgage borrower, and the new graduate struggling with student debt are living in sin? In the words of Paul, “Certainly not!” (Rom. 7:7).

Each of the biblical prohibitions and the condemnations of the church fathers are against the lender charging interest, not the borrower paying it. Moreover, the concern of Scripture and of church tradition is about stewardship, justice, and not being “lovers of money” (2 Tim. 3:2; see also 1 Tim. 6:10). Insofar as we are able then, it is wise to avoid participating in the sinful system predicated on usury. Yet we live in an economic system marked by injustice and greed that is largely beyond our control.

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Thankfully, Scripture also has much to say about living faithfully and righteously amid cultural systems that we cannot individually change. Daniel, Esther, Paul, and Jesus himself lived under oppressive political and economic systems. Rather than capitulating to the sin those systems encouraged, they instead acted in fidelity to God and love of their neighbors. Here too, the fact that we can’t personally change the structure of the global economy is not a reason to do nothing.

What that means in practice will depend on our circumstances. In the West, it may include voting and other political advocacy. That’s not to say economic justice should be our only consideration in the voting booth, but it deserves serious attention as we make decisions at the local and federal level.

In any context, it might look like local churches or individually wealthy Christians offering interest-free loans or other alternatives to predatory economic practices as some have considered here. It may be embracing a debt jubilee—grounded in the biblical Sabbath cycles of Deuteronomy 15 and Leviticus 25 that call for debt release and economic restoration—by buying and canceling accumulated medical debt, as some churches already do.

Regardless of where we are in life, the witness of Scripture and the teachings of the church compel us to practice this kind of radical love.

Jared Dodson teaches biblical studies and theology at Bushnell University and writes about Scripture, theology, and culture. You can follow his work on Substack at Walking alongside Scripture.

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