The teaching of Jesus is cognizant of each of the previous 'solutions' and their defects and is based upon the new 'solution by seeking the Kingdom,' considering the providence of God in nature, and taking no thought for the morrow. The latter upholds private property, the value of work, trade, the division of labor, and the submission to the powers that be. Its ideology is found in James and also in the Lucan books. Patiently and unpolemically Gordon unravels the relation of Luke to the rest of the New Testament, shows both its eccentricity and its ideological distortion of the synoptic material, and draws attention to unresolved contradictions. Luke's writings, it is clear, must be approached with caution by anyone attempting to employ biblical liberature to generalize on 'the Christian approach' to economic life.
Liberation theologians take note.
Patristic doctrine was inevitably affected by economic decline in the later Roman empire, itself a consequence of Diocletian's economically perverse legislation. It is impossible to do justice either to the merits or to the scholarly importance of this book in so brief a summary, and, of course, there are a few things to grumble about. The entirely conjectural dating of Old Testament material by current scholarship is taken rather too much for granted. The case against an uncritical reliance upon Luke alone would have been strengthened by an examination of the Johannine literature, almost entirely ignored in this book. The gap between the first and the third centuries A.D. might have been filled by some consideration of the Apostolic Fathers and of extracanonical material such as the Shepherd .