The Christian life
Charity and care for one's neighbour
What love actually is, who counts as a neighbour, and why almsgiving was never optional.
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Charity in Christian usage does not mean giving to good causes. It translates caritas, which translates the Greek agape - the love God has for us and which He pours into us. Almsgiving is one of its expressions, not its definition.
The New Testament's love is not primarily a feeling. It is willing the good of another and acting on it. This is why it can be commanded, which a feeling cannot be, and why it can be extended to enemies.
Who is my neighbour? is asked in Luke 10 by a lawyer looking for a boundary. Christ answers with a story in which a Samaritan - a member of a despised group - helps a beaten Jew, and then reverses the question. The lawyer asked who qualifies as his neighbour; Christ asks which man was a neighbour. The category is not a list of people who deserve your help. It is a description of what you do.
Almsgiving is not optional. Christ assumes it - when thou doest alms, not if. The early Church was known for it: pagan observers noticed that Christians supported not only their own poor but everyone's. The Emperor Julian, trying to revive paganism, complained that the impious Galileans supported both their own poor and ours.
Matthew 25 is the passage that will not let anyone off. The nations are separated on one criterion - food, drink, welcome, clothing, care for the sick, visiting the prisoner - and both groups are astonished, because neither recognised Christ in the person they helped or ignored.
All four traditions teach that what is superfluous to your needs is owed to the person in need, and that this is justice rather than generosity.
What love is
The New Testament uses agape for the love God has for the world and commands of us. It is deliberately distinguished from affection and from desire.
Its definition is given by an act, not by a description: hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us (1 John 3:16). And Paul's famous chapter is almost entirely a list of behaviours - suffers long, is kind, envies not, is not puffed up, seeks not her own, is not easily provoked, thinks no evil, bears, believes, hopes, endures.
Two consequences.
Love can be commanded. You cannot be ordered to feel affection for a difficult colleague. You can be ordered to treat him well, to speak of him fairly, and to want his good - and the traditions hold that the feeling, where it comes, generally follows the action rather than preceding it.
Love can reach enemies. Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you. This is only possible because love is the willing of another's good. If it were a feeling, the command would be nonsense.
Pause and thinkPause: the lawyer in Luke 10 asks "who is my neighbour?" - and Christ does not answer the question he asked. What does He do instead, and why does it matter?
The lawyer wants a boundary. He has accepted the commandment to love his neighbour and now wants to know where the obligation stops - which is a reasonable legal question and the wrong question.
Christ tells a story with three passers-by. Two are religious professionals who have excellent reasons to walk past; contact with what might be a corpse would make them ritually unclean and unable to serve. The third is a Samaritan - a member of a group his hearers despised - and he stops, treats the wounds, pays for the man's care, and commits to more.
Then Christ inverts the question: which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? The lawyer asked who qualifies as the object of his duty. Christ asks who acted as a neighbour.
The move matters because it makes the category undefinable in advance. There is no list of people to whom you owe help and, by implication, a much longer list to whom you owe nothing. There is only the person in front of you. And note whom Christ makes the hero
- the outsider, not the insider, which would have stung.
Almsgiving
The early Church's practice was extensive and organised, and the sources are worth knowing because the scale is usually underestimated.
Justin Martyr's account of Sunday worship ends with a collection: those who prosper give what they will, and the president is the guardian of all in need - orphans and widows, the sick, those in prison, and strangers.
By the mid-third century the Roman church was supporting more than fifteen hundred widows and distressed persons, according to a letter of Pope Cornelius. During the plagues of the second and third centuries, Christians famously stayed in the cities to nurse the sick while those who could afford to leave left - which historians have argued was a significant factor in the faith's spread, because basic nursing raises survival rates substantially.
The Emperor Julian, attempting to revive paganism in the 360s, wrote in frustration to a pagan priest that the impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well, and that everyone can see our people lack aid from us. He tried to establish a pagan equivalent. It did not take.
Three principles run through the tradition:
Give secretly. Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth. Giving that is seen has already been paid.
Give proportionately, and then beyond. The tithe is the Old Testament floor. Christ commends the widow who gave two small coins over the rich giving out of abundance, because the measure is what is kept back rather than what is handed over.
Give to the person, not only to the cause. Institutional giving is efficient and necessary. It is also easier, and it can be a way of never meeting anyone. The traditions insist on both.
Matthew 25, and what it costs
Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
Two features of the passage repay attention.
The criterion is not belief but action - food, drink, welcome, clothing, care for the sick, and visiting the imprisoned. Six things, all physical, all inconvenient.
Both groups are surprised. Lord, when saw we thee? Neither the sheep nor the goats recognised Christ in the person in front of them. The sheep were not performing piety; they simply helped, and discovered afterwards whom they had been helping. The implication is uncomfortable in both directions: you may be serving Christ without noticing, and you may be walking past Him the same way.
Where the four traditions stand
Catholic
The Church's teaching is codified in the corporal works of mercy - feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, visit the imprisoned, bury the dead - and the spiritual works of mercy - counsel the doubtful, instruct the ignorant, admonish sinners, comfort the afflicted, forgive offences, bear wrongs patiently, pray for the living and the dead. Almsgiving is one of the three pillars of Lent alongside prayer and fasting. Catholic social teaching supplies the framework: the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, solidarity, and subsidiarity. The Catechism quotes the Fathers on the duty of almsgiving in language that startles modern readers, and teaches that the demands of justice must be satisfied first, so that what is owed in justice is not offered as charity. Charity itself is the greatest of the three theological virtues, and the Church teaches that without it nothing else profits.
Orthodox
Orthodoxy's teaching on almsgiving is dominated by John Chrysostom, whose sermons on wealth and poverty are among the most uncompromising texts in Christian literature and are still read aloud in Orthodox parishes. His argument is that the rich are not owners but stewards, that excess is theft, and that the poor man at the church door is the altar at which one may always offer. Almsgiving is bound to fasting: the money not spent on food during the fasts is to be given away, which makes the ascetic discipline a means of charity rather than a private exercise. The tradition speaks of the poor as the least of these in whom Christ is truly encountered, and Orthodox spirituality treats philanthropy - literally love of mankind, the word the liturgy uses of God Himself - as participation in a divine attribute. Eastern practice has generally been personal and parish-based rather than institutional, a pattern partly shaped by centuries under Ottoman and then Soviet rule, when large-scale Christian institutions were not possible.
Lutheran
Lutheran teaching on charity follows directly from justification. Because salvation is by grace alone and good works contribute nothing to it, works are set free from any calculation of merit and can be aimed entirely at the neighbour - Luther's formula that God does not need our good works but our neighbour does. Luther's practical reform was the common chest, established at Wittenberg and Leisnig in 1523, which pooled parish resources for poor relief, education and support for the destitute - one of the earliest systematic municipal welfare schemes in Europe, and a deliberate replacement for begging and for the monastic charity that the Reformation had dismantled. Luther's Freedom of a Christian gives the theology in a sentence: a Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none, and a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to everyone - free from the need to earn anything, and therefore wholly available to the neighbour. Lutheran bodies subsequently built extensive diaconal institutions, and deaconess orders in nineteenth-century Germany pioneered modern nursing.
Anglican
The Prayer Book's Catechism sets out the duty towards one's neighbour concretely: to love him as myself, and to do to all men as I would they should do unto me; to hurt nobody by word nor deed; to be true and just in all my dealings; to bear no malice nor hatred in my heart. The Communion service includes the offertory sentences, a sequence of scriptural verses on giving read while the alms are collected - so that the collection is framed by Scripture rather than by an appeal - and the prayer for the Church militant asks God to accept the alms and oblations. Anglican social conscience has a substantial record: the Clapham Sect and the campaign against the slave trade; the nineteenth-century slum priests of the Anglo-Catholic revival, who went deliberately into the worst parishes of the industrial cities; Christian Socialism under F. D. Maurice; and William Temple, whose Christianity and Social Order (1942) argued that the Church has a duty to state principles for social order and helped shape the post-war settlement.
Work with it
Check yourself
How does Christ answer the lawyer's question "who is my neighbour?"
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Correct. The lawyer wanted a boundary to his obligation. Christ makes the category undefinable in advance - there is only the person in front of you - and makes the despised outsider the hero.
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The refusal to supply a list is the point of the parable.
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The Samaritan is precisely not a co-religionist of the man he helps.
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He answers it, but by changing what kind of question it is.
Check yourself
What did the Fathers say about giving to the poor - was it justice or generosity?
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Yes, and these passages are quoted in the Catechism. The ground is the universal destination of goods: creation is given to all, and what is superfluous to one is owed to the one in need.
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The Fathers deliberately refuse this framing, and Chrysostom calls failure to share robbery.
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Christ says "when thou doest alms", not "if".
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The traditions teach both personal and organised charity.
Check yourself
What is striking about the two groups in Matthew 25?
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Right. The sheep were not performing piety; they simply helped, and found out afterwards. The implication runs both ways, which is what makes the passage uncomfortable.
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The repeated question "Lord, when saw we thee?" shows otherwise.
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The six criteria are all physical acts of care.
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Both groups ask the same question.
Objection drill
The Church has always been very good at telling people to give to the poor while sitting on enormous wealth. Sell the art, melt the gold, empty the Vatican, and then talk to me about almsgiving. Until then it is hypocrisy.
A model answer
The complaint is old enough to be in the Gospels, which is where the most useful part of the answer is.
At Bethany a woman pours very expensive ointment over Christ's head, and the disciples object in almost exactly these words: this might have been sold for much and given to the poor. Judas makes the argument in John's account, and John notes his motive. Christ defends her. He does not say the poor do not matter - He has spent the entire Gospel saying the opposite - but He refuses to accept that beauty offered to God is automatically money stolen from the needy.
That does not settle the question, and it should not be used to end it. The argument still has to be met on its own terms.
Take the concessions first, because several are owed. Churches have accumulated wealth in shameful ways. Bishops have lived like princes while their people starved. Indulgence money built basilicas. There have been periods when the visible opulence of the institution was a genuine scandal and was recognised as such by reformers inside it
- which is why reform movements keep arising from within, from Francis to the
Reformation to the worker priests. A Christian defending the Church here should say this without hedging, because it is true and because refusing to say it makes everything else sound like special pleading.
Then the arithmetic, which is more interesting than the rhetoric. The Vatican's art collection is inalienable under Italian and canon law and could not be sold in any case, but set that aside. Suppose it were sold. The proceeds, distributed among the world's poor, would supply a very small amount each, once. And the world would have lost the Sistine Chapel, which is currently free to see for anyone who can get to Rome, and would most likely have gained a private collection in a bank vault in Geneva.
Meanwhile the Catholic Church runs, at last count, over five thousand hospitals, more than sixteen thousand health clinics, and thousands of orphanages and homes for the elderly, and educates tens of millions of children, a large proportion of them in countries with no other provision. It is, by most measures, the largest non-governmental provider of health care and education on earth. Whatever one thinks of the institution, the claim that it sits on wealth and does nothing with it is not accurate.
On beauty specifically, there is an argument worth hearing rather than dismissing. The great churches were built in cities where most people owned almost nothing, and they were the only beautiful spaces those people were ever inside. They were not private. A labourer in fourteenth-century Chartres had access to the finest building and the finest music in his world, on the same terms as the nobility. The instinct that the poor should get functional provision while beauty is for those who can pay is not obviously the more generous one.
And then the part of the objection that should be kept. The charge lands hardest not against cathedrals but against the ordinary Christian's own accounts, which is where Basil and Chrysostom aimed it. The bread you hold back belongs to the hungry. The coat in your wardrobe belongs to the naked. Those sentences were not written about the Vatican; they were written to congregations of reasonably comfortable people, and they are quoted in the Catechism because the Church still means them.
So the honest reply is not a defence. It is: you are right that wealth held by Christians while people starve is a scandal, the Fathers said so more fiercely than you have, and the first place either of us should apply it is not Rome.
Memory work
Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.