The dull humanitarianism of contemporary Christianity came up
here recently, humorously (to me anyway) attacking itself in a mirror:
What I mean is this — many who claim to love Jesus with their theology hate the poor with their economics, and I think we should stop being okay with that. I frankly think we should knock it off — the gospel is not some airy fairy thing that fails to apply to how people have to live out their actual lives. When Jesus taught us to feed the poor, instead of turning their place of habitation into a desolation, this necessarily excludes every form of Keynesianism.This swipe at the left's hypocrisy is hypocritical and blind in its own way, but it is difficult to appreciate it when we are captives of an historical moment full of unexamined assumptions and unresolved historical contradictions and loyalties. For one thing, it can be demonstrated that neither side in this debate loves "Jesus with their theology". Unfortunately, their love of him picks and chooses what it wants from "his" teaching just as they pick and choose whom to help from the poor. And for another, polite discussion of the poor amongst Christians left and right these days merely objectifies, patronizes and condescends to the poor, so that a great gulf yet remains fixed between them and the poor.
Take the statement, "When Jesus taught us to feed the poor". That's a nice sounding phrase which no one on either side finds objectionable, except that Jesus didn't teach us to feed the poor. Unfortunately this is not only the accepted and false premise of Christians left and right, but it has become the accepted and false premise of our entire politics, and it is wrong. What are the poor, dogs, who once fed get to go gamboling on their way? And who are we then but their owners?
Yes, Jesus fed the 5,000 (Matthew 14:21; Mark 6:44; Luke 9:14) and the 4,000 (Matthew 15:38; Mark 8:9) and spoke very positively of the poor and very negatively of the rich, even though the poor who hung on his every word he addressed as "you who are evil" (Matthew 7:11; Luke 11:13). But nowhere do you get from Jesus' teaching a programmatic statement like that, which is surprising when you have a Sermon on the Mount or a Sermon on the Plain replete with programmatic statements of all sorts. You know, like "Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you" (Matthew 5:42; Luke 6:30).
How many times have I heard from Christian pulpits that one should not give money to people who beg on the streets because they'll just "use it to buy liquor"? Isn't that what we use ours for?
If there is any programmatic statement of Jesus ignored by all and sundry today it is the very basic one you were likely to hear from Jesus every time he showed up in a new venue and set up his soap box:
Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.
-- Mark 10:21; Matthew 19:21; Luke 18:22
No, far from being "some airy fairy thing that fails to apply to how people have to live," Jesus expected his followers, as a condition of discipleship, actually to stop living as they "have to" and demonstrate repentance by the act of wealth liquidation and divestiture to the poor, and by becoming poor themselves. In other words, Jesus demanded that his followers change places with the poor and turn their own "actual lives" into a "habitation" of "desolation". This is repentance as reversal, a literal turning upside down of every thing, every relationship, every obligation.
Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
-- Mark 1:14f.
This point cannot be stressed enough. Jesus demanded that people divest themselves of everything that they are and have as the way to "fill the hungry with good things", and, more to the point, become poor themselves and escape the wrath that is to come, and come soon.
When was the last time you heard a Christian talking like that, especially in the "Bible-believing" churches which promote both Biblical inerrancy and free-market capitalism? Christians are supposed to take personal responsibility for the poor, sell everything they have, and give it to them.
I think the last time I heard anything remotely like this was from Anthony Quinn as the pope in The Shoes of the Fisherman. Needless to say, I've frequented liberal Methodist churches and witnessed the dull humanitarianism at its best, which is indeed impressive in its way, but it's still what it is. Those Methodists still have a place to lay their heads at night, and money to go out to lunch together on Sundays after church. And they all have churches, and indeed keep building more of them, maintaining them, heating them, cooling them and filling them with very noisy machines to entertain themselves with.
Divestiture of everything one has, owns and is, dare I say including even all social connections and their obligations, is now the lost meaning of repentance in the teaching of Jesus. Very few people are familiar with this anymore in America, except for some priests and members of monastic orders who actually take vows of poverty.
Writing way back in the early 1930s one Oswald Spengler observed that this understanding was already then long lost in Europe, and goes on at some length to show how this original doctrine of Christian renunciation as a moral doctrine was replaced with materialist philosophy by the church itself in the wake of the Enlightenment. One cannot help but think that had Europe's Christians actually practiced their faith instead of selling-out wholesale to materialism there might not have been a Great War. And of course not long after Spengler died Europe exploded again, proving one more time that its Christianity was a complete fraud, just as ours is today.
To repent includes sorrow over personal sinfulness and what it has done to other people, to be sure, but nothing so ephemeral as an emotion can encompass the true meaning of repentance as Jesus understood it. Unfortunately, however, emotion epitomizes the current understanding of Christianity in the West. It is nothing but an evanescent, psychological phenomenon.
To Jesus, by contrast, to repent is actually a physical turning away from the direction in which one is going, which is the conventional way of the world, the way of the many, the easy way which leads to the certain destruction which comes upon you in your sleep after you sat up late planning to build bigger barns to hold all your gain (Luke 12:18). You know, physically turning away from your house, your job, your 401k. And your beautiful wife and children, and the dog. With all these goods Jesus expected one to make a sort of restitution when repenting and following him, a settling up of accounts so to speak, in addition to getting rid of the entangling alliances they involve, and rely wholly and utterly on God for his salvation.
The cost of this discipleship in the teaching of Jesus is the same for everyone, whether rich or poor or in-between: 100% of one's very self and all that that means. From the ruler whose possessions were so very great that he went away sorrowful (Matthew 19:22; Mark 10:22; Luke 18:23) instead of giving them all away to the poor and following Jesus, to the disciples who complained (!) that they had in fact left everything and followed him (they had: Matthew 19:27; Mark 10:28; Luke 18:28), to the old widow who inconspicuously (to everyone but Jesus) put into the Temple alms box just two mites (which constituted "her whole life" Mark 12:44 says), there is nothing which may be held back by anyone no matter what their station in life. And lest we forget, that goes for the poor, too, who often cling to the mean, squalid conditions of their existence as tenaciously as the rich cling to theirs.
Like death, Jesus' call to discipleship is the great equalizer of humanity, wherein all the distinctions of human existence bleed away into nothing. Not obeying this call will get you turned into a pillar of salt like Lot's wife, or laid out at room temperature as Ananias and Sapphira found out. The repentant will escape the coming judgment, but they are few, and those who turn back from the plough, or go home first to say goodbye, or insist that the obligation to bury a dead relative has priority, these are many, and it is they who get taken for tares by the suddenly appearing Reaper Angels of the Last Judgment, are gathered up with all who do iniquity and bundled together with all those who offend, and are thrown into the fire. Which is when the meek finally inherit the earth.
The repentance doctrine of Jesus survives in its starkest form in an unlikely place, the Gospel of Luke, where kingdom interpretations "already realized" and "not yet realized" clash in the same long historical narrative and form a sort of interpretive bridge between the kingdom coming-now-before-even-Israel-is-fully-evangelized idea found in Matthew 10 (and assumed in Mark) and the kingdom relegated-to-the heavenly-realms idea of the much later Fourth Gospel:
So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.
--Luke 14:33
It doesn't get much plainer than that.
But it occurred to somebody along the way that there was a certain moral inconsistency in the teaching of Jesus which became difficult to resolve in the years after Jesus' death. This had everything to do with the historical inconsistency, the failure of the coming kingdom "now" idea which Jesus entertained throughout his career right up to the bitter end of his tragic life. After the kingdom failed to arrive during the mission of The Twelve as he famously but mistakenly predicted in Matthew 10, Jesus nevertheless continued to believe in it, as Albert Schweitzer first showed us long ago. The debacle of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem may be another example of it, where he made a big show in the Temple but got such an unexpected response that he had to use crowds by day and escape out of the city under cover of darkness by night for his own personal safety. And Mark shows Jesus still angling at the very last moment for a dramatic finish when at his trial Jesus tells the high priest that the high priest himself will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven (Mark 14:62).
It was not to be.
This coming kingdom "now" idea eventually got pushed back to a "coming back soon" idea in the form of Christ's return from heaven, as in St. Paul, to the point that mockers arose by the end of the first century saying "Where is the promise of his coming?" (II Peter 3:4). The Fourth Gospel came to the rescue just at this moment, complete with a Holy Spirit who revealed the real gospel, to give us a Savior who descended from heaven, instead of a Davidic King who brought us a restored monarchy of Old Testament prophecy and the Rule of God in a "kingdom come". This Eternal Logos of John's invention accomplished his work of redeeming humanity, and ascended once again to prepare a place for all who believe, helpfully omitting all the urgency implied by an impending end of the world, or even of an imminent second coming.
So in this context what do you suppose would happen to a doctrine of total renunciation predicated on the imminent end of the world? Of course it would get pushed aside just to avoid having to explain that Jesus was just a little off about the timing of the Apocalypse. But it is at once a measure of the thoroughness of our sources that they should still preserve the memory of it, as it is evidence of the deep respect with which Jesus' teaching was held, however difficult to integrate it might have been, Holy Spirit guiding into all truth notwithstanding (John 16:13).
The moral problem, I think, is less well appreciated. In the context of an imminently coming end of the world, suddenly saddling the poor with riches arguably could be justified on the grounds that the possessions wouldn't have time to corrupt them. The world would end too soon and be transformed for the no longer poor to succumb to the temptations. But introduce delay and now Jesus' teaching could possibly be guilty of hanging millstones around their necks which would keep them out of the kingdom of heaven forever (Matthew 19:23f.; Mark 10:23ff.; Luke 18:24f.).
Under such circumstances there was every reason to minimize the renunciation doctrine found in the Synoptics in favor of the new perspective enunciated in John where Jesus now merely says "the poor ye have always with you" (John 12:8). In John the poor still exist, but the rich no longer do.
Few appreciate that in that new framing the Evangelist has now put the objectification of the poor into the mouth of Jesus, as if Jesus and The Twelve are no longer to be identified as one and the same as the poor. No, now the followers of Jesus aren't the poor; they have the poor and are distinct from them in a way which is foreign to the equalizing message of the historical Jesus from the Synoptics in which the followers of Jesus become one with the poor. This also means that the world isn't going to end anytime soon, there will always be rich people and there will always be poor people just as there have always been, and really the only important thing now is the Savior, the Heavenly Redeemer, on whom rich ointment may indeed be lavished (John 12:3), or later . . . on his Vicar on earth, the pope. In that vignette from the Fourth Gospel is the birth of the church as charitable organization, following on the pattern of Jesus and The Twelve it presents, and gone is the directive to become poor. Rather, as that Gospel famously concludes, the directive now is that Peter "feed my sheep" with the gospel, with which the church is now rich.
Consider that according to John Jesus' followers kind of got left holding the bag quite literally when Jesus left them behind. For something like three years, or perhaps eighteen months on John's chronology, they had depended on the almsgiving of the people as they followed the man expecting God's kingdom to arrive at any minute. Judas was their Treasurer and kept "the purse". From it they not only paid their own expenses, but from it they themselves gave to "the poor". As givers of alms themselves and encouragers of same, the focus now turned to them in the absence of Jesus and they began to attract the poor as the place where the poor could beg and not be refused, just as Jesus taught. Soon The Twelve were transformed into the leaders of a self-perpetuating poverty relief machine as the poor, and the donations, kept rolling in.
So yes, the church repented Jesus' definition of repentance, and made its accommodation with the world. To that extent it may be decided by left and right in the church today that there is a basis for its materialist view of life and that they have a right to argue about the relative merits of various "economics" as if it were a category separate from "theology". The man they claim to worship, however, demonstrably had a different opinion of the matter.
