Call and Response

The Church and the Poor: Historical Perspectives
By Glenn Sunshine | Published Date: August 22, 2011
Poverty principles

Remembering the poor
In the previous article, we looked at New Testament models of poor relief, noting that the early Christians were very generous in sharing what they had with those in need, but also that they were very careful about who was enrolled as dependents of the church. That said, the apostolic church considered “remembering the poor” to be among its most basic moral imperatives (Gal. 2:10).

Christians continued to take care of human needs over the succeeding centuries. Even prior to the legalization of Christianity, Christians took the lead in caring for the sick, even at great personal risk (as the Roman physician Galen attested). After Christianity was legalized, they, more than anyone else, fed the hungry (as the pagan emperor Julian the Apostate recognized); throughout history, the Church has also been heavily involved in education (as evidenced by the number of schools and universities that have been started by missionaries and churches).

In the Middle Ages, all organized charity was administered through the church or through para-church organizations known as confraternities. These lay religious institutions provided for the poor either generally or through targeted giving to specific causes, for example providing dowries for poor girls.

Medieval monasteries
Perhaps the most interesting example of Christian efforts to aid the poor is found in the medieval monasteries. St. Benedict of Nursia, whose rules for monastic life were the foundation for nearly all Western monasticism, mandated that his monks take a vow of poverty and at the same time be engaged in work—understood primarily in agricultural terms as production of goods. There were two reasons for this: first, in the ancient world work was seen as demeaning, and thus having the monks work promoted humility; second, Benedict recognized that God gave Adam work to do in the Garden before the Fall, and so work was good no matter what society thought of it. And, as we have seen, the Apostle Paul also taught this.

But a curious thing happened. Although many of the monasteries became corrupt—little more than country clubs for the nobility, who lived in luxury whatever their vows said—other monasteries were vitally concerned with following a pure version of Benedict’s Rule. The Cistercian order is a good example of this. The Cistercians made sure that the monks were all engaged in productive labor and at the same time banned conspicuous consumption and luxurious living, insisting instead on a strict understanding of the vow of poverty.

Productive labor resulted in increasing profits. While some of that was given away, given the limitations on transportation and the relatively sparse population, there was still a surplus after giving to the poor. Since it was wrong to let the produce spoil, it was sold and the proceeds were used to purchase more land since the vow of poverty meant that the cash couldn’t be kept. This in turn increased the productive potential of the monastery. The thought was, if production is good, more production is better.

The monks themselves could not work all of the land, so they brought in tenant farmers who grew crops and gave a fixed amount back to the monastery. The monks thus provided employment for the lay people outside of the monastery, giving them meaningful work and a chance to benefit from their own labor.

The net result is that a strict understanding of the monastic vow of poverty led the Cistercians to become very rich, while also benefiting those who lived around the monasteries.

But the story doesn’t stop there. The monks understood that though work is good, drudgery is a result of the Fall and is therefore bad. Christ came to redeem us from the results of sin, and thus as His followers we need to work to restore meaning to work by eliminating drudgery. As a result, the monks also used their excess profits to find ways to harness technology to do repetitive, mindless work rather than having people do it.

Monks were the first to use waterwheels—a technology known to but never deployed by the Romans—to grind grain; the waterwheel was then adapted for a wide range of other uses outside of the monasteries, including operating bellows and trip hammers for forges, fulling cloth, and making paper. These technologies further increased productivity while at the same time eliminating some of the drudge work associated with production.

The monasteries were thus the beginning of many of the essential elements of capitalism, particularly the reinvestment of profits to increase production, motivated by a Biblical understanding of work and the image of God.

The unintended effect of all this was to raise the amount of goods available to people and therefore raise the standard of living in Europe across the board through the central Middle Ages. This also produced important social changes, including most notably the conversion of the vast majority of European serfs to free peasants.

Cities and the poorIn the sixteenth century, cities began to see care for their own poor as a civic responsibility. The Reformation heightened this trend, since without the Catholic organizations, someone had to pick up the slack in caring for the poor. At the same time, many reformers continued to insist that this was an ecclesiastical function, with varying degrees of success.

At their best, town governments developed innovative and comprehensive approaches for dealing with the poor in a way the hodgepodge of confraternities and religious orders had been unable to do.
For example, when the city of Geneva converted to Protestantism in 1535, it replaced all of the Catholic relief organizations with a single “General Hospital.” The Hospital was a comprehensive social welfare institution that took care of all needs except communicable diseases. It used a vertically integrated, interlocking approach to provide for the needs of native deserving poor, orphans, the elderly, and those unable to work.

Orphaned, illegitimate, or abandoned boys would work on farms under the direction of the Hospital, thereby learning the skills needed to be farmers. The grain they produced was then brought to mills, where other boys were taught to grind the grain; it then went to bakeries, where other boys were taught baking. The bread was then distributed to the elderly and infirm who could not work for themselves. Girls were similarly given opportunities to learn skills that they would need later in life.

All of this was supervised directly by hôpitaliers and funded through the work of procureurs. When Calvin wrote the church order for Geneva, he identified these offices as deacons in the church, thereby baptizing existing Genevan practice and creating the kind of mixed church-state institution that is only possible in state churches.

Nonetheless, even in a world where church and state are separate, the Genevan model points toward a kind of church-state cooperation in social welfare that is actually practiced in many places in the US today.

More than just feeding the poor
These examples show that dealing with poverty involves more than just feeding the poor: it requires economic structures that promote human flourishing holistically. Significantly, this does not mean reorganizing society to shift wealth from those who produce it to those who do not; rather, it means providing opportunities to all to earn their own way and providing a safety net for those who cannot.
This all-too-brief history shows that biblical ideas about work, the image of God, property rights, and generosity lead to sound economic thought. And not surprisingly, those ideas also benefit society as a whole—including doing more to relieve poverty than any other economic system in history.

What is surprising is how few people in the church and the society today recognize the importance of the Biblical ideas, the role of the Church in economic thought, and the profound impact for good these ideas have had.

In the next and final article in this series, we will look at some specific principles we can glean from Scripture and history that can guide us in our approach to helping the needy.

Redistribution and the Church

By Glenn Sunshine | Published Date: August 01, 2011
Poverty principles

The Church and the poor
In the last article, we began an examination of the role of the Church in dealing with poverty. While it is abundantly clear from both Scripture and history that the Church must be involved in poor relief, some of the arguments of those who emphasize this aspect of the Church’s work misread and misunderstand what the Bible actually has to say about this.

We see this, for example, in Ched Myers’s Sabbath Economics. Myers argues that the story of the manna in the Old Testament is intended to teach us that God provides abundantly for our needs (not our desires), but forbids accumulation.[1] Myers’s exegesis results in a host of distortions of the text—for example, his conclusion about the lesson of the manna is very different from Moses’ (Deut. 8:3)—and his economic assumptions lead him to twist Jesus’ parables, as discussed in the last article.[2]

But what of his central idea, shared by other progressives such as Shane Claiborne, that the Church is to be an anti-capitalist community based on voluntary redistribution of goods?

First, as I argued in a previous article, the Bible is absolutely clear that those who have must share with those who have not. John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, John, James, all tell us that the rich are obligated to help the poor. So yes, in that sense, redistribution is a part of living faithfully before God.

One misreading
On the other hand, simplistic, communal redistribution schemes are neither Biblically-mandated nor effective in truly helping the poor.

Ched Myers cites the manna story as a prohibition on accumulation, but ignores the fact that the Israelites carried out great wealth from Egypt, some of which they contributed to the building of the Tabernacle. Evidently, despite the manna, God was not concerned with them holding on to property, even great wealth.

This is not surprising, considering that the right to property is grounded in the image of God and God’s mandate to Adam in the Garden of Eden. In fact, the inalienable right to property is critical to the Jubilee, one of Myers’ inspirations for Sabbath Economics, as well as the laws prohibiting theft and covetousness.

But what about the “community of goods” described in the Jerusalem church, in which the believers “held all things in common?” (Acts 4:32) This is a favorite verse for those who believe that redistribution is a central responsibility of the Church. Yet a careful reading of the text and of the next few chapters shows that the Jerusalem church did not operate as a commune, whatever a superficial reading of this verse suggests.

Private property
Read in context, “they held all things in common” is an example of hyperbole—the rhetorical device of using exaggeration for emphasis. The following verses tell us that when there was a need, people sold their property to meet it. In other words, they recognized that their responsibility to their neighbors was more important than their ownership of their property, so they were quite willing to sell what they had to help others—but that means that they retained ownership of their property until a need arose which led them to sell it.

This is reinforced in the following chapter, where Peter affirms Ananias’ and Saphira’s right to their property and to the proceeds of its sale (Acts 5:4). In other words, private property was maintained in the Jerusalem church and thus that they did not literally “hold all things in common,” though generosity was encouraged and practiced.

Myers never explicitly rejects private property and does argue that redistribution should be voluntary. But since he also argues that accumulation is forbidden, it would seem that property ownership would involve the Christian in the kind of unjust economic system that Myers claims all believers are called upon to dismantle. How these two ideas fit together is not entirely clear.

Caring for the poor: widows
The trajectory of poor relief in Jerusalem does not stop in chapter 4 or even 5. Chapter 6 shows that the informal sharing of resources that had developed in the church did not work effectively; ethnic divisions led to a breakdown of the system that had to be corrected through a more organized approach to helping the poor (specifically, the widows) to be sure that all were adequately cared for.

Because of this experience, the church in Jerusalem drew up rolls of widows who were dependent on the church and appointed seven people to oversee the distribution of aid, the first deacons. At this point, the Jerusalem church numbered several thousand people, yet only seven were needed to deal with the needs of the church’s dependents. How did that work?

The answer is found in 1 Timothy. Evidently, the widows roll in Jerusalem became the model for other churches, including the church in Ephesus. Paul tells Timothy that only certain widows are to put on the church’s rolls; the rest should remarry or be cared for by their families (1 Tim. 5:3-16).

It is even possible that these widows were given specific responsibilities in the church. Early church documents indicate that the Church had an “order of widows” whose job was to minister to women in ways that would have been inappropriate for men.[3] If so, this would be consistent with Paul’s warnings against idleness and his insistence that those who can work, do so (2 Thessalonians 6-12).

To put it differently, the Church’s regular distribution of food was limited to those who had no other options or resources and who devoted themselves to prayer and service to the saints (1 Tim. 5:5, 10). As a result, there were relatively few who were on the rolls, and the church in Jerusalem could therefore get by with only seven deacons. While Christians also engaged in extensive ad hoc charity to the needy, only a very limited number of people were allowed to become dependents of the Church.

Giving for emergencies
Or course, the Church also engaged in giving in emergency situations, such as the famine in Jerusalem, for which Paul took up collections in Asia Minor and Greece (1 Cor. 16:1-4). This is the context for 2 Cor. 8:13-14, which Myers uses to argue that redistribution must be a regular activity of the Church. But these comments did not deal with “regular” giving within the Church, but rather with a response to an emergency in a far distant church, one that gave an opportunity for a concrete demonstration of one of Paul’s central ideas, the unity of Jews and Gentiles in Christ (cf. Rom. 15:27).

None of this means that Christians are not called upon to share with those in need. We absolutely are, and on this point the progressive movement among Evangelicals is beyond doubt correct. The key question is how best to do this.

Words and deeds
This analysis suggests that a balanced, Scripture-based approach to helping the poor is considerably more complex than the “community of goods” model and takes into account such core Biblical ideas as the significance of work and private property, along with the importance of loving our neighbor with actions, not just words.

The issue of accumulation is particularly important here, because without it, economic and technological growth, medical advancement, the arts, and a wide range of other activities would come to a grinding halt. As it turns out, however, there are examples in history where a more Biblically-balanced understanding of economics and responsibility to the poor had a massive (though under-appreciated) impact on society. Surprisingly enough, some of the most important examples of this come from medieval monasteries, where the monks took vows of poverty. We will look at these in our next article.

Poverty and the Church

By Glenn Sunshine | Published Date: July 11, 2011
Poverty principles

In the previous articles dealing with poverty, we noted several important principles that should govern our ideas about poor relief.

• Our greatest responsibility is to those closest to us, starting with our own families. The more removed people are from us, the less our direct responsibility to them.
• Work is an aspect of the image of God and is central to human dignity; the best way to help people in poverty is to help them earn their income rather than having them rely on someone else to meet their needs.
• When people face immediate needs, those needs must be met. Ideally, however, the recipients should be transitioned toward self-sufficiency as soon as possible so they can retain their dignity and pay it forward to others in need.
• Government may have a role in poor relief, but that role should be subsidiary to individuals and local charitable institutions; when government does get involved, it should be on as local a level as possible.

This leads to the immediate question of the role of the Church in relieving poverty. Christians as individuals clearly have great personal responsibility for helping the poor; what should be the role of the local church?

The early ChurchThere can be no question that the early Church was involved in caring for the poor. The church in Jerusalem in Acts 4 is perhaps the most obvious (and most misunderstood) example of this, but we can look as well to the aid delivered to the church in Jerusalem from churches in Asia Minor and Greece as an additional example of caring for those in need within the Christian community.

But Christians did not only take care of their own poor. They ministered to the sick and dying, purchased slaves to set them free, clothed the naked, and fed the hungry whether they were Christians or not. This was recognized by Julian the Apostate, the Roman Emperor who attempted to re-paganize Rome after Christianity was legalized. Julian complained, “These impious Galileans [i.e. Christians] feed not only their own poor, but ours as well.”

Julian’s reaction was based on the fact that the pagan world was not much given to charity, and so the Church’s role in feeding the poor created a space in Roman society that was not under imperial authority and therefore undermined his rule. As the Church has moved away from its ancient practice, it has surrendered this area once again to Caesar.

Evangelism and the poorHistorically, evangelism had always been linked to social welfare programs, ranging from feeding the poor to establishing hospitals and schools. In the early twentieth century, American Church leaders inspired by German liberal theology essentially abandoned evangelism in favor of the “Social Gospel” and a nearly exclusive emphasis on this world. Conservative theologians rejected this change as a betrayal of true Christianity, but unfortunately they reacted by focusing exclusively on evangelism and the afterlife while ignoring the relevance of the Gospel of the Kingdom for this life.
American evangelicalism is still suffering from the aftermath of this division, which has discredited Christianity in the eyes of many young people in the country.[i]

The fact is, the emphasis on an exclusively other-worldly Gospel does not do justice to the teachings of Jesus or Paul, as Ron Sider, Jim Wallis, and more recently Ched Myers and Shane Claiborne have argued.

“Progressive” evangelicalsUnfortunately, many of these “progressive evangelicals” have largely baptized the programs of the secular left and confused them with a Biblical vision for caring for the needy. Wallis, for example, has tied himself to government solutions for poverty through his close association with secular progressives and funding from the atheist George Soros.

Claiborne and Myers see economic redistribution as an essential component to the Gospel: Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution tells us that “rebirth and redistribution are inextricably bound up in one another,” and Ched Myers’s Sabbath Economics presents a vision of Christianity that is 100% economic, with no mention of any spiritual dimensions to salvation.

Sabbath Economics illustrates a number of important themes in this movement along with its problems. The book’s premise revolves around three points: God provides enough for His people if they restrain their appetites and live within limits; differences in wealth and power are not natural and the community of faith must correct them through redistribution; the prophetic message of Scripture calls us to redistribution, which is what makes it good news for the poor (pg. 5).
The first point comes from Myers’s interpretation of the story of the manna, which teaches us that God provides for us, but that accumulation is forbidden (pg. 13). In fact, Myers sees the entire manna episode as a parable about the superiority of hunter/gatherer society and local horticulture over intensive agriculture, cities, and the resultant slave-based imperial economies (pg. 11).[ii]

The prohibition of accumulation is further reinforced by the story of the rich young ruler, about which Myers concludes, “Whatever else the kingdom of God may be, it is where the rich are not!” (pg. 31)—evidently confusing it being difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven with it being impossible, an error Myers might have avoided had he not made the climax of the discussion Mark 10:26 rather than Jesus’ own conclusion in 10:27.

The idea of redistribution comes from the Old Testament Sabbath year and Jubilee, where property was returned and slaves set free, the Jerusalem church in Acts 4 (more on that in the next article), and Jesus’ description of his ministry as preaching good news to the poor. According to Myers, the only thing that would qualify as good news to the poor was the cancelation of their debts (pg. 23), and so Jesus’ ministry was fundamentally about economics.

He even argues that although in the New Testament, the Greek words for debt and sin are different, in Aramaic they are the same, and so when Jesus talks about forgiveness of sins he really means releasing people from monetary debt (pg. 24). In other words, in rejecting the emphasis on the next life of contemporary evangelism, he has made the Gospel all about this world.
These assumptions guide Myers’s approach to Scripture and lead to what can only be described as tortured exegesis of some of Jesus’ parables. For example, in the parable of the vineyard, the absentee landowner is the one who faces judgment, not the tenants (pg. 27).

Similarly, in the parable of the talents, it is not the ones who use their talents who are the heroes because according to Myers everyone would have recognized that the only way they could have doubled their investment was by exploitation (pg. 42). Myers here ignores the example of Isaac, who got a one hundred-fold return in his harvest (Gen. 26:12). He also misses the fact that the master was away for a long time (Matt. 25:19); even at the low rates of return he claims would have been acceptable, the servants could potentially have doubled the money without exploitation. The only reason to see these servants as exploitive is because if they aren’t, Myers’s economic argument falls apart.

Myers instead sees the servant who hides the talent as the real hero, because he refused to participate in an exploitive economic system. Myers’s justification for this reading is that the third servant called the master a “hard man”—a term used for Pharaoh elsewhere in Scripture—and the master quotes it back to him without refutation (though in parallel passages the master makes it clear he is judging the servant using his own words).

Both the tenants and the third servant come to an unfortunate end, though Myers argues that this is not the result of divine judgment but the action of the unjust, oppressive system of the world which always persecutes the righteous. The descriptions of their fate—being executed or cast into outermost darkness—are in other parables references to divine judgment, but to fit his assumptions Myers has to argue they mean something different here.

The examples can be multiplied.[iii] This forced exegesis (or to be more accurate, eisegesis—reading into the text rather than drawing the meaning out of it) is a sure sign that the assumptions Myers brings to Scripture are wrong. While his recognition of the relevance of the Gospel to this world is laudable, his approach is wrong-headed, owing more to a Christianized version of Marxist economic determinism than to a Biblically faithful vision of economics within the community of faith.
We will examine the issue of redistribution and develop a more balanced view of biblical economics and the church in the next article.