This is a fascinating question that is really one of the pillars of the study of Late Antiquity, if we’re talking about Christian views on wealth in the later patristic period (between, say, the Crises of the Third Century and those of the Fifth). One of the really transcendent pieces of recent scholarship on the period, Peter Brown’s Through the Eye of Needle (the title obviously referencing your “harsh words”), reviews the complexities of this exact topic. Its 600-page length should tell you how fundamental and complex this topic really is, especially given that Brown only looks at roughly 350-550 CE.
As a couple of caveats, it’s worth noting that “Christian” views on wealth then, even more so than now, will vary by region and by affiliation. African Donatists, Roman Pelagians, and Eastern ascetics—all of whom were active in this period—may each come to radically different conclusions on what to do with wealth. It’s also worth noting that I have limited expertise on the earliest Christian communities. I can only pick things up once the movement really started gaining traction post-Constantine.
That said, we can outline some things in brief. First, it’s important to realize that early Christianity arose into a classical culture of giving dominated by the quintessentially Roman patron-client relationship. That is to say, Roman charity had little of the “from the heart” sort of attitude we expect today. This is highlighted best in the case of the annona—the Roman grain dole. You received the "annona" as a function of your citizenship, not as a function of your poverty. Similarly, the rich were the "amatores patriae" who showed their love of city (and shielded themselves from criticism for their wealth) by displays of euergetism—sponsorships on a massive scale (some particularly fascinating, lavish stuff went on in the fourth century) of feasts, games, and festivals.
So this was the general order of things in the classical world. The rich were able to stay rich because they distributed their money freely in support of things that kept the poor satisfied. This was an established, expected relationship on both sides.
The old order was shaken, particularly in the fourth century, by the growing Christian critique of wealth. We find this a lot in Ambrose, including some real gems like “God’s justice, which avenges the tears of the poor, is poised to strike” in his scathing critique of the wealthy, On Naboth. Christians of this period were more likely to view public giving, and wealth generally, through the Hebrew tradition of pious giving. This might include gifts like that of Paulinus of Nola—the real apex of Christian giving in the fourth and fifth centuries—to support shrines, or it may be a more standard distribution of wealth through the church to the poor. This new order expected the wealthy to give not as one pole of a patron-client relationship, but rather as religious ritual.
It’s here worth remembering that the fourth and fifth-century super-rich (and I do mean super-rich) have that wealth as a result of, and deeply tied up in, far-flung agricultural villas. And, at this point in the early fifth century, we’re also entering a world where the bonds of connectivity linking these far-flung villas are rapidly eroding. This means it’s quickly becoming much harder to be wealthy on this sort of international scale. This made it progressively easier for some of these super-rich (see Pinianus and Melania the Younger) to denounce their wealth, offering it to the church in a new sort of “euergetism” with the people of God as the new “populus” client.
Really prominent thinkers like Augustine seem to have won the day on this movement, arguing that wealth was not inherently evil and ought to be given to the church to ensure its most upright use. And in a new post-410 age of austerity—compared to the extravagance of the fourth century—critiques on wealth just didn’t have quite the same currency. And, as Brown puts it with the most Brownian of flourishes describing this shift in expectations, “The joining of generosity to the expiation of sin would become the prevailing breeze throughout the churches of the West” (379). In other words, in a post-Augustinian world, the rich are able to pass through the eye of the needle, provided they’re properly lubricated by gifts to the people of God through the church. This is an idea that was really only able to gain traction as a result of the socio-economic collapse in the West.
All of this is to say that the Christians of the late Roman period had a hard time with this problem too.
References:
Brown, Peter. "Through the Eye of a Needle." Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West (2012): 350-550.
Ambrose. On Naboth.
/R/askbiblescholars has some good theologians that might be able to answer a question this broad. Slower sub but some good reading.
Can you cite the verses in question where these “harsh words” can be found?
my question wasn’t meant to be condescending. Just was curious
I’m glad /u/TaterBakes was able to answer the question about the shifts in the early days of Christianity because my answer will focus on the much more recent history! Rather than just starting in 1500 CE and attempting (read: failing) to describe all of the various schools of thought throughout Christendom, I’ll talk about two relatively recent strains of Christianity which have very different views on wealth.
Before really getting into it, though, I think it’s worthwhile to identify some of the specific “harsh words” Jesus had on the topic of wealth; of course, this is not an exclusive list, but I think these are probably the passages most relevant to the question.
• “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:19-21, New Revised Standard Version)
• “No one can serve two master; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (Matthew 6:24, NRSV)
• “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” (Matthew 6:25-27, NRSV)
• The young man said to him, “I have kept all [of your commandments], what do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” (Matthew 19:20-21, NRSV)
• Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:23-24, NRSV)
• Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.” (Matthew 21:12-13, NRSV)
• Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” (Luke 12:16-20, NRSV)
In the Americas, there are two large Christian movements which immediately spring to mind in the context of followers’ relationship to wealth: the theology of prosperity and the theology of liberation. These two interpretations of the Gospel are fascinating in that they are such different understandings of what most would consider to be the same essential faith. It should be noted that these are far from all-encompassing—most Christian denominations would not directly fall into either of these two camps, although they have almost certainly been influenced by both to some degree.
Prosperity Gospel
Pretty much any American who has paid any attention to religion in their own country will likely have some familiarity with the prosperity gospel; think Joel Osteen and basically any megachurch. Adherents usually don’t refer to their ministries as following prosperity gospel or anything like that; they usually identify as “evangelical, charismatic, Pentecostal, or most frequently, nondenominational” (Bowler, 2010, p. 11), but that’s not to say a congregation identifying as any of those is necessarily one invested in prosperity theology or vice versa. At its most basic, the gospel of prosperity proclaims that God will bless faithful individuals with wealth. This might seem out of step with the biblical passages I quoted earlier, but it makes more sense once you track the history of this movement a little bit.
I think it is best to make the Protestant Reformation our starting point, specifically with John Calvin. Of course, Luther publishing his Ninety-five Theses in 1517 are conventionally thought of as the beginning of the Reformation, but Calvin’s lesser-known Institutes of the Christian Religion, published in 1536, also had a huge impact on how we think about Christianity to this day. This tome became the most instructive document guiding the still-young Reformed Christian tradition that would distinguish it from both the Catholics and the Lutherans. Calvinist thought was unique a few important ways. Fundamentally, Calvinism asserts that God bestows mercy upon certain people based upon unknowable but apparently arbitrary criteria; those who He selects are saved from damnation and there is nothing anybody can do about it. Whether or not you are saved has nothing to do with whether you are “worthy” of God’s mercy, just that your status has been predetermined by Him. If you are among those selected for saving, you will eventually be compelled to the gospel simply because you were selected to be saved. If you ever become an apostate, either you were never actually selected to begin with or you will eventually return to the faith through the grace of God.
It might be tempting to presume that this school of thought should lead its believers to become hopeless and therefore unproductive, people were supposedly inspired to do everything they could to appear as though they were among those preselected for saving. However, the idea was that if you were actually marked to be saved, you would necessarily be compelled to demonstrate God’s grace by working hard and being frugal. Naturally, anybody who wanted to believe—or wanted others to believe—they were among the saved would try to make hard work a basic part of their identity, even though it could never bear out any real consequence according to Calvinist doctrine. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Max Weber builds the case that this work ethic is unique to Calvinist Protestants and that the Protestant fervor for work allowed them to accumulate more money than any other group while being very restricted on what they could actually spend their money—luxurious goods were forbidden and donating to the poor was robbing them of the opportunity to partake in all the glory of hard work! Weber supposes that these conditions were the driving force behind the birth and spread of capitalism. It is important to note that Weber’s hypothesis is hardly settled and has largely been viewed as unsupported by the evidence by academics, but his ideas have nevertheless persisted.