Inventing the poor: how the early church practiced charity

Christian Century, June 14, 2003 by Walter Brueggemann

This rhetorical revolution not only redefined the relationship of the rich and the poor, it also redefined the relationship of the believer to God. God could be addressed with urgent petitions as a matter of right.

Brown delighted this reviewer with his appreciation of the Psalter and would delight any right-minded Calvinist with his appreciation of Karl Barth's statement in Church Dogmatics IV, 2: as a poor man, writes Barth, Christ "shares as such the strange destiny which falls on God in His people and the world--to be the One who is ignored and forgotten and despised and discounted by men."

Brown finishes with a remarkable discussion of the Christology of Nestorius and Cyril of Alexandria in their effort to sort out both the distance and solidarity between the Father and Son by comparing it to the distance between God and believer and between rich and poor. The accent is upon solidarity. Brown argues that the rhetorical revolution that legitimated the cry of the needy transformed all relationships away from earlier modes in which the poor were mute and invisible.

The church still has a chance to employ such rhetoric in a technological society that wants to deny a voice to all those who live "outside the program." Brown does not make any "contemporary extrapolation" from his study, and we should not expect a disciplined historian to do so. In his final two sentences, however, he recognizes the contemporary urgency that is intrinsic to his argument: "The hope of solidarity itself, and the recognition of its attendant burdens, still weighs upon us today. It has remained a fragile aspiration, as much in need of condensation into symbolic forms of requisite density and imaginative power as it ever was in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries of the Common Era."

Of course, the interface of Christianity with classical culture is very different from the church's interface with the current U.S. economic-military hegemony and the shameless power of the market to damage human communities. Yet the parallels are suggestive enough that we might consider the accomplishment of those ancient bishops as instructive for the contemporary church.

Those who champion an undifferentiated "market society" shrilly shout "class war" if one suggests that the poor are a distinct social presence. If the poor can remain unrecognized, then no special effort on their behalf is required. I imagine that the practitioners of the old civic virtue of euergesia thought the same thing. But the Christian bishops, fed by the rhetoric of the Psalter, insisted upon a differentiation that denied the illusion of social cohesion.

The contemporary church has important allies in its attentiveness to the poor--allies like Derek Bok, who in The Trouble with Government gives us statistics that make the plight of the poor inescapably vivid. He reminds us, for example, that "5.3 million households in 1995 consisted of 'very low-income renters' who received no federal housing assistance and either lived in severely substandard housing or paid half or more of their reported income for rent." Or like Lewis H. Lapham, who in the December 2002 issue of Harper's points out that the "grotesque maldistribution of the country's wealth over the last 30 years has brought forth a class system fully outfitted with the traditional accessories of complacence, stupidity and pride."