Friday, February 28, 2014

Cheerful Givers: How the Early Christian Church Alleviated Poverty



In his book, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire, Peter Brown, Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University, comments on Christian charity and their treatment of the "poor" in the early (pre-Constantinian) Church. Most fascinating is his description of the way Christians viewed themselves as a vital society within the world yet not of the world:
  The sharp pen of Lucian… is one of the first glimpses that we have from an outsider into the inner workings of a Christian community. ...
  A century before the conversion of Constantine, the Christian communities were characterized by a sharply "bifurcated" notion of the duties of the rich and the poor. Not one group, but two groups, claimed the support of the "cheerful givers" in every congregation. 
  First, of course, there were impoverished fellow believers--orphans, widows, the sick, the imprisoned, refugees, and the destitute. As far as we can see, Christian almsgiving at this time was a fiercely inward-looking activity. It did not include unbelievers. Rather, it strengthened the boundaries of the community, like solid rings of bark around a tree, by not allowing any fellow Christian to be forced by poverty to restore to help from nonbelievers. 
  Nor was it a random matter. The bishop and the clergy were supported by a share of the offerings of the faithful. But they received these offerings, in part, in the name of the poor: they were to redistribute what remained from their own upkeep to the widows, orphans, and destitute. The bishop was presented, above all, as the oikonomos, as the "steward," of the wealth of the church. This wealth was to be used by the clergy for the benefit of the poor. In some circles, even private almsgiving was discouraged: ideally, all gifts to the poor were to pass through the bishop and his clergy, for only they knew who needed support.
  This last was an extreme opinion. But the centralization of wealth in the hands of an energetic bishop could be decisive. The letters of Cyprian, bishop of Carthage from 248 to 258, are impressive testimony to his use of wealth for the care of the poor in order to reinforce his notion of the Catholic church as a closed, embattled community grouped around its bishop. Only those "poor" who were known to have stood firm in times of persecution and to have remained loyal to the bishop in the crisis that followed were to receive support. Local heroes who had endured imprisonment in times of persecution received allowances. Cyprian provided refugees out of his own private funds, thereby saving well-to-do Christians the shame of accepting alms as if they were members of the indigent poor. The boundaries of the Christian community were protected. Christian traders were given bridging loans. A convert who had made his living by teaching acting (a profession tainted by idolatry) was maintained by the poor fund of his local church. Cyprian advised the bishop to send him to Carthage, where the church, being wealthier, was better able to support him until he learned a new trade. A considerable sum--one hundred thousand sesterces, the equivalent of half the yearly salary of an Imperial secretary or of a month's wages for three thousand workmen--was hurriedly collected in Carthage to ransom Christians captured in a raid by Berber tribesmen. Unfortunately, the list of donors that was appended to this letter has not survived. Would that it had. With it we might have had evidence of a Carthaginian Christian community of unexpected wealth and social complexity. Altogether, in the words of Graeme Clarke, the translator of the Letters and the author of by far the best commentary upon them, Cyprian's letters provide "practical evidence of the Church constituting a society within a society, a regular tertium genus."
  Thus, a solid middle core of "cheerful givers" was called upon to support two sharply different groups of dependent persons, each of which was liable to considerable expansion--both the clergy and the poor, with the clergy claiming to act as distributors of the wealth of the church in the interests of the poor. Writing in 251, to the bishop of Antioch, Cornelius, bishop of Rome, emphasized the extent of this double responsibility. …In 303, we learn that a police raid on the premises of the church of Cirta, a provincial capital, found a storeroom with sixteen shirts for men, thirty-eight veils, eighty-two dresses and forty-seven slippers for women, along with eleven containers of oil and wine. Furthermore, we know that the church of Cirta had, besides its bishop, at least three priests, two deacons, two subdeacons, one grave-digger, and five readers. None of these were paupers. One reader was a schoolmaster and the other a tailor, a sartor--or, perhaps, even a skilled craftsmen in mosaic work, a sarsor: that is, he was exactly the same sort of skilled artisan as Lucian's uncle, the sculptor, had been and from whose trade Lucian had escaped to higher things. But all the clergy--that is, the priests and deacons--and possibly lesser personnel as well, would have received from their bishop regular sportulae. These were gifts derived from a weekly division of the offerings of the faithful. The offering itself was a major ceremony, performed each Sunday. It involved a procession toward the altar and the solemn dividing up of the contributions of the faithful at a table loaded with offerings in cash and in garden produce. 
  Thus, when Constantine deeded to patronize the Christian church in 312 he found a body committed to a double charge: a duty to give to the poor and a duty to support the clergy. He also found among the Christian laity many well-to-do persons who had long been alerted to the need to scrutinize the clergy whom they themselves supported, to ensure that their money was spent to good effect. An ideology that linked the wealth of the church to the "care for the poor" and that made the clergy responsible for that care was firmly established in Christian circles before the conversion of Constantine. It would have been what a lay person (such as Lucian) would have known about the new sect.1 




1.  Peter Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire [Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002], pp. 23-6 











Monday, February 17, 2014

Book Review: The Tangible Kingdom by Hugh Halter & Matt Smay

The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community: The Posture and Practices of Ancient Church Now

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Reading entirely through The Tangible Kingdom is like eating toast smothered in strawberry-habanero jam. It’s sweet enough to hold your interest to the last bite, yet hot enough to make people regret it the next morning. The Tangible Kingdom claims to be a book about re-creating the mission of Jesus, his apostles, and the early Christian churches, when, in fact, it’s really about creating an intuitively dreamy fad for those who have been disappointed with organized Christian religion in America. This is not to say it doesn’t make many valid points about, or provide any helpful insights for, reforming ugly habits of American evangelicalism. What I am saying is that the “incarnational presence” portrayed throughout this book is more anecdotal than ancient in its presentation.
      This book can be divided roughly into four sections. The first section (chs. 1-5) is about identifying the church’s negative impact in society, and it begins with the author’s own life experiences, focusing especially upon God’s call for him to lead potential God-seekers into something new, but not something entirely new:

“This type of new is about a returning. Returning to something ancient, something tried, something true and trustworthy. Something that has rerouted the legacies of families, nations, kings, and peasants. ….What we’re returning to has always been and must still be revolutionary. What we need to dig up, recover, and find again is the life of the Kingdom of Jesus’ community… the church.” (p. 10)

      The claim is made that there is a culture war brewing between two camps of Christians, and this book is admittedly bias toward one side (p. 20). In order to recover the life of churches today, Christians need to start doing things which the Church has not been doing, and stop doing things they have been doing (p. 12). For example, churches need to stop being like “Jerusalem Christians” (p. 19) who view Jesus “through their traditions and the literal interpretation of doctrine.” These types rely too much on sermons that focus on behavior (e.g. sin) and programs to transform people (e.g. Billy Graham crusades, Promise Keepers, Alpha, etc.). Instead of holding “doctrine so tightly that …the life of Jesus gets obscured” (p. 19), they need to be more like the “Galilean Christians” who engaged the world and “interpret[ed] the Bible through the life of Jesus,” focusing especially on the atonement, justice, mercy, love, benevolence, and advocacy for the poor, oppressed, and sinners. This, allegedly, will keep people from becoming “idolaters of the Bible” who “prioritize head knowledge over heart life” (p. 20). Church, doctrine, “Bible,” and keeping hostile people out of the Church must not be the goal of the gospel anymore. Instead the goal of the gospel should be to “start identifying ourselves with [hostiles], and allow Christ’s redemption to flow over all.” (p. 31).
      The second section (chs. 6-12) is about removing traditional obstacles that get in the way of this healthy “reemergence” of ancient faith (p. 38), especially the problematic “postures” which offend the status quo of potential god-seekers in the world. Instead of focusing on “communicating a message of truth to the world” (p. 41), the “most important thing” is whether or not unbelievers are attracted to embodied truth first, so they can become more willing to receive the truth later. (p. 41). Christians need to go back to the “fringe movement” of the “pre-institutional church” (i.e. before Constantine; p. 50) which followed the ways of Jesus and practiced the “art” of not feeling any compulsion to feed people spiritually while still being willing to look after their spiritual formation (pp. 53-55). “Church” needs to become what it allegedly once was: a people you belonged with instead of a place you went to (p. 55), a place that “was unique, intriguing, and attractive primarily because it called for inclusion of all people” (p. 70), advocating “love of all people regardless of past mistakes, sexual orientation, or political bias.” (p. 88). Instead of arguing philosophy or debating alternative religious viewpoints, Christians should simply “live a different story” and invite people to observe (p. 76) so “sojourners” can feel or see aspects of the gospel lived out (p. 95-96). The truly “missional” way is to look like a church on the outside, yet be a place that “anyone can come to and not feel any pressure at any level.” (p. 116)
      The third section (chs. 13-17) is about implementing “incarnational habits” to live by once the basic obstacles to “incarnational mission” have been removed. The authors offer four neatly alliterated points: leaving, listening, living among, and loving without strings. Leaving involves replacing Christian activities with time spent building relationships with the surrounding secular culture. Listening means regarding no one from a worldly point of view and showing sincere regard toward an individual’s experience, background, heritage, through which they process faith and belief. Living among means integrating one’s self and family into the fabric of society while “participating in the natural activities of the culture around you, with whimsical holiness.” (p. 136). Loving without strings means blessing others without any coercion, and helping the unlovable feel loved without any catch.
      The fourth section (chs. 18-21) describes what “incarnational community” looks like so it can be duplicated successfully throughout future generations. It covers the “primary spheres of Incarnational Community” (Communion, Community, and Mission; p. 148) and some general barriers (like mandating a “tithe” or encouraging weekly corporate worship, p. 168) that hinder these spheres from working properly together.
      I think the “sweet” aspects of the book expose Church-life as having a genuine crisis on its hands. Secularism does not take the Church seriously, and a significant reason for this is because Christians are often not compassionate and forgiving “friends of sinners” like Jesus or his apostles. Much of their “friendship” is programmatic at best. Even worse, many are obnoxious for God, lording their doctrine over others because in their minds the truth is obnoxious and sinners need their nose stuck in it to remember it well. Their benevolence often has strings attached too. Christians are often not invested in their own neighbor’s welfare, or integrated into the fabric of their own local community, and therefore are not salt and light within it. More care is given to believing what is right than doing what is good, which I believe is a soul-damning dichotomy; this book exposes that.
      However, I’m not convinced that the program espoused in this book truly represents an “ancient” tradition, which is what really “burns” the next morning. With a mere 42 passing references from Scripture, more than half of which are anecdotal or attached to some sloganized eisegesis (the most notable one being from John 8; pp. 44-45), the biblical arguments actually seem subversive of some ancient foundation stones, possibly without even knowing it. Most subversive, in my mind, was the extremely casual approach toward corporate institutional worship, as though it’s really less important to God than sipping a signature coffee blend while listening to a porn-addicted “sojourner” talk about the good old days of high school football. Although it is true that Christians ought to embody a deep and sincere sacrificial love for their porn-addicted neighbor—especially on the Lord’s Day—they must not forget that corporate institutional worship is a public expression that they are His Body and Bride, and they cheapen His Supper if they exchange it for a pumpkin spice latte and cranberry scone. It is wishful thinking to believe, as the book claims, that without ever encouraging “sojourners” to obey truth, you will usually get them to obey truth (p. 67).