Has Anybody Seen ‘Erape’? (Part II)

Christianity faces the world with agape, not merely with eros, nor with some sentimental amalgam (“erape”). Wherever professing Christians lack agape as a distinguishing virtue, they detach themselves in principle from the mercy God has shown undeserving sinners in his great gift, Jesus Christ. No religion like Christianity has dramatized, by the fact of divine incarnation and atonement for sinners, the high virtue of rescuing persons overwhelmed by need. Charity becomes evangelical when it reflects the drama of redemption through genuine sacrifice on the part of the donor, and when it extends not only to the “deserving” (whose need springs from no fault of their own) but to the “undeserving” (whose ignorance, folly, or perversity has worsened their plight).

The Christian approach to almsgiving is 1. regenerative, 2. personal, 3. voluntary. Respect for these fundamental criteria will avoid misconceptions of the nature of Christian charity.

CHARITY AS TESTIMONY

Christian welfare work is regenerative because it seeks by its witness to restore men to God and to their true destiny. Evangelical charity is a commentary on the Gospel of God’s undeserved redemption of fallen man, a vehicle for lifting needy persons to the Saviour and Lord of the whole personality. The Christian feeds the hungry to distinguish the Bread of Life. To shape a new outlook on life while relieving destitution is a legitimate and desirable Christian aim.

Whenever this witness is suppressed, charity’s Christian status is blurred, and its vitality threatened. Unless agape is lighted by divine justice and justification, its authentic evangelical character is lost. Charity that does not confront men with Christ may as readily desert them to Marx.

Christian charity unquestionably embraces human destitution even where its witness cannot be directly given, and where the deed must speak for itself. Agape doubtless works whether associated with proclamation or not, although, as Dr. Oswald C. J. Hoffmann of The Lutheran Hour reminds us, diakonia without kerygma leaves man’s deepest needs unmet. Agape even reaches to men who reject its witness to Christ (as God’s goodness now extends to just and unjust alike). When “rice Christians” multiply, invoking the “name of Christ” merely for the sake of material aid, Christian institutions must not only recall the natural perversity of men, but resist the temptation to narrow their welfare vision to “the faithful” exclusively, thus giving other unfortunates the misimpression that they are outside the pale of Christian interest.

But agape never voluntarily conceals its willing witness to the Lord of love. Lifting almsgiving into the orbit of divine concern for man and his fellows, Christian charity points beyond humanitarian pity in the relief of suffering. It relates the human predicament to the divine command, exhibiting charity (and the recipient’s benefactions) as a matter of obedience to God’s gracious will. Thus the testimony-aspect of charity guards against the religious impulse’s replacement by motivations of self-glorification and pride, or its decline to utility and other sinister forms of self-interest. Altruism shaped by such humanitarian formulas swiftly shades into egoism in seasons of stress and passion.

CHARITY AS PERSONAL

Christian participation in welfare work, moreover, is essentially personal. In relieving the misfortunes of others, it seeks to restore the sense of spiritual community, of family oneness by creation, while dramatizing the spirit of neighborliness as that is grasped within the family of the redeemed. Welfare work on this basis not only helps to overcome an “atomistic” view of society, but it escapes the secular humanitarian tendency to view the needy as so many “case studies” indexed by a given file number. Skilled administrators are needed in welfare agencies and some social workers, assuredly, seem better able than ministers to preserve the self-respect of individuals and families in need. But much contemporary social work has in fact deteriorated to a mere body of techniques. Real skill in social activity will preserve rather than obscure the personal dimensions of life.

Doubtless the institutionalizing of charity jeopardizes this personal touch. But it need not wholly destroy it. Even in the New Testament, collections for relief of the poor were administered in the name of the local churches by the apostles, who thus supply an early precedent for a collective form (but not for a public or state form) of charitable administration. So their spiritual ministry would not suffer neglect, the apostles themselves, after first personally handling all distributions to the poor, soon named deacons—thereby introducing a third-party relationship—to distribute to material needs. They did not consider the organization of welfare activity to be intrinsically objectionable.

These precedents do not of themselves, however, legitimate a larger view of the Church engaged in massive almsgiving as a corporate earthly institution. In much modern church welfare work, the Good Samaritan and the man in need are actually many steps removed from each other; seldom do donor and receiver meet face to face. The Church neglects to encourage charity in this dimension of direct neighbor-relations at great cost to the effectiveness of her witness. Ecclesiastical pleas for unified denominational budgets, as well as projections of welfare work along presbyterial and episcopal rather than congregational patterns of administration—almsgiving being regarded as the duty of the corporate Church acting as a group (as by the Episcopal Prayer Book)—tend to minimize the personal relationships in stewardship. Yet, it must be acknowledged, even churches whose ecclesiology stresses local autonomy (as in the case of Baptists) have felt constrained to organize large conventions to promote efficiency and effectiveness in their corporate witness. And one congregation can seldom support an orphanage. But the fact remains that the complaint most often aimed at ecclesiastical leadership is its loss of personal and local sensitivities. Does not the Church need to guard the virility of Christian charity by preserving not only its witness-character, but its sense of a vital personal relationship between benefactor and recipient?

A dissipation of the personal factor takes place in many great private foundations established for charitable purposes. In most cases such foundations arise to assure the perpetuation of ideals that are too often blurred by established agencies which welcome the funds but corrode the convictions. After safeguarding this legitimate personal interest, however, foundation charities frequently drift into impersonal stewardship through their reliance on professional administrators. The result is the concentration of charitable power in the hands of men who did not bring these foundations into being, and who may then dispense gifts without the warmth and vision of the founders.

The most extreme form of impersonalism, largely destructive of the very concept of stewardship, however, occurs through the surrender of charity to the state as a tax-supported activity. The routine and impersonal government administration of homes for the aged and public poorhouses often stands in sharp contrast to the alms houses motivated by personal charity. As the churches abandon the responsibility for welfare to the state and rely more and more upon unspiritual methods of relieving human misery, they indirectly, if unwittingly, support a theory of state charity that, ultimately, may tolerate even the Church’s welfare activities only as an arm or agency of the state’s program. When the limits of state power are in doubt, and when government programs of benevolence are urged as much for the purpose of equalizing wealth as for the relief of human misery, then charity is easily subverted by an alien ideology and becomes a means of implementing schemes hostile to Christian sanctions, to Christian methods, and to Christian virtues.

CHARITY AS VOLUNTARY

Perhaps in narrowing the opportunities for voluntarism in the sphere of stewardship, the modern philosophies betray most pointedly their clash with the biblical view of benevolences. Christian almsgiving is, as we have stated, not only regenerative and personal, but voluntary.

While charity confers a temporary material benefit upon the recipient, expositors of Christian morality have long stressed that charity also yields a moral benefit to the giver. In modern social welfare work, however, the volitional element is often narrowed to the vanishing point. This need not be the case—even in state welfare programs—since charity as a collective effort through government is possible, as Dr. Russell Kirk points out, where tax levies are in fact, and not only in theory, a voluntary grant (taxation reflecting a free act of those who vote the taxes for the common welfare). But representative government today tends too often to reflect representative pressure blocs more than the people. And tax-supported welfare remains involuntary on the part of those who vote against these measures.

Voluntary community agencies provide some check upon the transfer of welfare responsibility to government, and hence also serve to check the development of the welfare state. But in times of depression and hardship, supporters of these congregate services are not likely—in the absence of the sanction and dynamic of revealed religion—to pay heavy compulsory welfare taxes to the state and in addition to give voluntarily to community charities. Hence taxation tends to stifle charity.

Students of government remind us that as government moves from county to state and Federal levels the voluntary element is progressively weakened. Those who pay the taxes often do not clearly understand their purpose. Moreover, the prospect enlarges that those who pay the taxes will be outvoted by those who get them, and by those who administer them. The government’s growing grab for tax monies therefore provokes counter-efforts to preserve the remnants of voluntary stewardship. Avoidance of taxes sometimes becomes a prime consideration in establishing a foundation, and charity resting on this motive is obviously not purely benevolent. But government welfare, established on a permanent basis, soon destroys the opportunity for voluntarism and the very idea of charity.

Nowhere is this dissipation of voluntarism more important than in its bearing on the churches. From the early days of the Christian movement the function of the churches has included material aid to needy persons. Neglect of this duty has always meant that the churches themselves would suffer spiritually. But today the penalty of such neglect means the removal of almsgiving from the Church to government as the authorized welfare agency. The voluntary element is, of course, already lessened whenever gifts are made, even to the churches, by donors who tithe simply as a legal routine, or because of unrelenting pressure of a finance committee, or because of fear of public opinion, so that charity becomes a matter of somebody else’s expectation or insistence. But voluntarism virtually disappears when that third party is the state. If the benefit of the relief of poverty, viewed as a work of virtue, accrues to the donor more than to the recipient, the substitution of state compulsion for voluntarism dissolves this benefit.

In this transition, moreover, something more has happened. Not only has almsgiving ceased to be voluntary on the donor’s part, but it becomes obligatory also in the recipient’s view. The government dole is looked upon as a right rather than as a love-gift. Indeed, the state’s welfare allotment is so much regarded as a right that some recipients even prefer subsistence aid to work.

STATE MONOPOLY OF WELFARE

That the churches are given the opportunity of cooperating in a massive program in which the state virtually takes over diakonia, that the growing government monopoly of welfare activity is hailed as a valid expression of Christian love for neighbor, that the denominations, moreover, virtually become agencies of this state program, calls for earnest soul-searching. The Church will always pay a high price for giving to Caesar what belongs to God.

How, from the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the designation of deacons in the Acts, does the Church arrive at institutional agencies for meeting a neighbor’s need? Or at the voluntary agency’s necessary cooperation with the welfare program of the state? Or at confusion of the welfare state with the kingdom of God, so that the former is heralded as an authentic fulfillment of Christian love for neighbor?

And what remains in this of Christian testimony, of the personal element, and of voluntarism? Where is agape? Perhaps erape can already report “mission accomplished,” while we comfort ourselves with the delusion that he does not really exist.

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