A Preliminary Studies on the New Testament Economics: With the Focus on The Parable of the Shrewd Steward in the Gospel of Luke

The Parable of the Shrewd Steward presents the slave oikonomos who has sufficient agency at the time of crisis. In the wake of life and death, the parable become not merely strategic but also prophetic, since the visions of the beyond emerge from and react to the present. By describing “critical transcendence,” Luke pointedly argues that poverty is not God’s curse for their sins; nor is wealth God’s blessing. The parable achieves, as its outcome and consummation, full human beings. Their constructive roles undercut calming certainties allied with the relationships of power and property surrounding the master and the slave and build the economy and household of God by way of crafting communal humanity (e.g., “making friends,” 16:9) and fashioning themselves as individual persons (e.g., “I have resolved what to do,” 16:4). Dreaming out of his mixed experience of living on the periphery, he unabashedly engages the existing political-economic order. His subjectivity of creating and entering the oikos (e.g.,“their houses,” 16:4; “the eternal homes,” 16:9) pertains to both materialistic and transcendent liberation. In a world where many employ god-concepts to justify scarcity and scarcity thinking, the Gospel lays its prophetic oracle by providing stories from a redeemed end that is continuously materialized in the present moment. Luke does not suggest that believers should stand aloof and isolated from the world; on the contrary, it encourages them to be involved in the world. By affirming the subjectivity of the people of God, Luke helps them to proclaim and exemplify the vision for the world in this age, rather than extricating themselves from it. Over and against any oppressive political-economic framework, their maneuver becomes not only deconstructive, but also reconstructive, laying the groundwork for an alternative path in the present.