Is it in the Bible to forgive student loans?

Is There a Biblical Case for Student Loan Forgiveness?

Christians disagree about whether or not Biden’s promise to wipe out student debt is moral and fair according to the Bible.

A rally was held in front of the White House to ask President Biden to get rid of student loans.
As soon as President Joe Biden kept his promise to wipe out between $10,000 and $20,000 in student loan debt for each borrower in eligible households, Christians cited a lot of Bible stories and ideas, from Old Testament ideas like jubilee to the parables of Jesus in the New Testament.

Last week, people searched BibleGateway 20 times more than usual for topics related to debt for two days. The most-read passages on the site were four verses, two for and two against loan forgiveness:

Exodus 22:25 says, “If you give money to a poor person who is part of my people, don’t treat it like a business transaction and don’t charge interest.”
Deuteronomy 23:19 says, “Do not charge an Israelite interest on money, food, or anything else that can earn interest.”
Psalm 37:21 — “The wicked borrow and do not repay, but the righteous give generously.”
“It is better not to make a vow than to make one and not keep it,” says Ecclesiastes 5:5.
People were looking for the words “usury,” “paying debt,” “charging interest,” “debt,” “forgiveness of debt,” “debt paid in full,” and “paying your debts.” We heard from three Christian thinkers about how biblical principles affect how we feel about the government letting people off the hook for their debts.

Matt Tebbe, who started Gravity Leadership and wrote “Having the Mind of Christ,” is an Anglican priest in Indianapolis and co-founder of Gravity Leadership.

As Christians, our very lives depend on being forgiven of our debts.

Christ loved us by canceling the debt we owed for our sins (1 John 4:10), and he told us to do the same for each other (John 13:34). To love like Jesus loves us is to take part in God’s kingdom economy, which is based on giving and getting back what you owe.

Jesus tells us to pray that our debts are forgiven as we forgive those who owe us money (Luke 11:4; Matt. 6:12, 14). This includes both money and social debts. In our modern, secular worldview, the spiritual and the material are often seen as separate things. In God’s kingdom, on the other hand, the social and economic aspects are spiritual.

What would it look like to take God’s warnings about usury and predatory lending that leads to debt (Exodus 22:25, Ezekiel 22:12) seriously? As part of God’s kingdom (Lev. 25:8–17), to return ancestors’ land and free people from unfair debts?

The Bible says that it is much worse for the rich to take advantage of the poor unfairly by eating up widows’ houses and hoarding money than it is for the poor to lose their lives because of debt (Mark 12:40; Luke 6:24–26; James 5:1–6).

Christians, let’s make a promise to forgive debt in a way that helps the poor and powerless more than it helps the rich and powerful, by loving each other the way Christ loved us.

Paul Matzko is the author of “The Radio Right” and a Research Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

Some public thinkers support the Biden administration’s plan to forgive student loans by pointing to the biblical idea of jubilee. Every 50 years in ancient Israel, land was given back to the people and their debts were forgiven.

It’s not clear that a law that limited property ownership to a tribal ethno-state and tried to stop foreigners from getting too much land, money, or power should be directly used as policy in the United States today.

Even more questionable is whether the biblical systems of jubilee and sabbath, which helped the poor and dispossessed, are a good comparison to a policy to forgive student loans, which will mean a regressive redistribution of wealth from poorer taxpayers with less education to disproportionately privileged college-educated workers with a much higher average future earning potential.

We should fight the urge, shared by both new Christian activists on the Left and the Right, to make our policy preferences into a religion. There is no clear, single teaching in the Bible about paying off student loans. We must look for answers in the world around us, not in special revelations.

Joshua Wu is the editorial director of the Asian American Christian Collaborative (AACC) and the senior vice president of analytics at a public relations firm in Washington, D.C.

Even though the Bible talks about forgiveness and economic fairness (like in the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18 or the idea of jubilee in Leviticus 25), Christians can and do disagree about whether canceling student loans is the best way to show that these ideas are true.

If, as most economists think, this policy will increase inflationary pressures, is it worth the cost to help some people who really need it? Is this the best way to fight for economic fairness? Would it be better to use the $300 billion that this is expected to cost to permanently increase the child tax credit, given how well it worked in 2021 to reduce child poverty?

Because public policy is so complicated, it is hard to say what biblical policy is. As Christians, we shouldn’t look for proof texts in the Bible to back up our policy preferences.

Instead, we should share our biblical beliefs with others in a humble way and do research on alternatives, cost-benefit analysis, and unintended consequences as we seek human flourishing and the common good.