Jonathan Kopke

For more than thirty years, I’ve been pondering what the Bible teaches about money.

In 1988, Dr. Richard Towner invited me to become a charter member of his Stewardship Education Committee in the “world-wide equipping center” of Cincinnati’s College Hill Presbyterian Church. As a committee, we vowed to study what the Bible teaches about money, and to practice what we were studying, and to train others in what we were practicing. Over the course of the next decade, the more we studied what the Bible teaches about money, the more I encountered the unavoidable tensions among those Bible passages. Finally, it dawned on me that “everything God wants us to know” about money is found, not just in isolated Bible verses, but also in the very tensions among them. It took me another decade of study and prayer and introspection, but in 2011, I fulfilled my vow to our original committee by publishing these insights in my book God’s Thrifty Extravagance. And now after a third decade of rumination and feedback, I’ve updated and expanded those insights in a revamped book titled To Both Ways Free. In these books, and in other articles that I’ve written, I’ve always adhered to the authority of scripture and the supremacy of Christ.

Those same core values have also guided me in my 42-year career of developing software for health-science applications at a major research university. I have publications in the fields of laboratory automation, postural disequilibrium quantification, community intervention for at-risk families, and living-donor kidney transplantation. At the same time, I also served as the editor of a university-published magazine on the uses of computers in higher education.

My only college degree is in mathematics, and I’m continuously aware that the only authority I have to teach about biblical principles has to come from dependence on the scriptures themselves, and from obedience to them. “Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:5-6).