"Westerners have a complicated relationship with money. We don't like it when wealthy people receive special treatment or look down on the rest of us as riffraff. But many (can we say most?) of us aspire to 'the good life.' So while we're aware of the dangers of wealth--we're willing to risk them, because we don't consider being wealthy morally questionable in and of itself. On the contrary, we more often associate immorality with poverty. This is due, in part, to how Westerners understand wealth.
Westerners instinctively consider wealth an unlimited resource. There's more than enough to go around, we believe. Everyone could be wealthy if they only tried hard enough. So if you don't have all the money you want, it's because you lack the virtues required for success--industry, frugality and determination. A nineteenth-century biographer of George Washington put the matter this way: 'In a land like this, which Heaven has blessed above all lands...why is any man hungry, thirsty, or naked, or in prison? why but through his unpardonable sloth?' There appears to have been a trend from very early American thought to invert Paul's proverb 'If a man will not work, he shall not eat' (2 Thessalonians 3:10 NIV 1984) to read, 'If a man will not eat, it is because he doesn't work.' People know what they need to do to make money, we think, so if they're poor, they must deserve it.
This understanding of wealth is the very opposite of how many non-Western cultures view it. Outside the West, wealth is often viewed as a limited resource. There is only so much money to be had, so if one person has a lot of it, then everyone else has less to divide among themselves. If you make your slice of pie larger, then my slice is now smaller. In those cultures, folks are more likely to consider the accumulation of wealth to be immoral, since you can only become wealthy if other people become poor. Psalm 52:7 describes the wicked man who 'trusted in his great wealth and grew strong by his wickedness in two ways: he trusted in wealth and he destroyed others. Yet the psalmist considers these to be on action. This is a type of Hebrew poetry scholars call synonymous parallelism, in which the two clauses say the same idea with different wording. In other words, hoarding and trusting in wealth was destroying others.
More significantly, Westerners often assume that the wickedness in 'trusting in great wealth' has nothing to do with the wealth but solely with placing our faith in wealth instead of God's faithful provision. The psalmist implies something different. The wicked person, we're told, piles up more wealth than he or she needs. In the ancient world, there were always those in need (according to Jesus, there will always be; Matthew 26:11). The condemnation came not in accumulating wealth but in piling up 'great wealth.' Only a wicked person would continue to pile up 'great wealth' and so destroy others.
A school superintendent made national news for refusing to collect his salary for the last three years of his career. He had been well paid. The story quotes his most surprising comment: 'How much do we need to keep accumulating?' asks Powell, 63. 'There's no reason for me to keep stockpiling money.' This story struck many people as admirable but as nearly unbelievable. But my (Randy's) Indonesian friends would have thought the superintendent's actions were expected. California schools were in financial trouble and he was already wealthy. Our understanding of wealth certainly influences our interpretation of the Bible. It can make us uncomfortable about the harsh words that biblical writers and speakers, including our Lord himself, use about the wealthy (see, for example, Mark 10:25 and Luke 6:24)."
- E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O'Brien
from: http://www.amazon.com/Misreading-Scripture-Western-Eyes-Understand/dp/0830837825/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1378921512&sr=1-1&keywords=misreading+scripture+with+western+eyes
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