Reckless Charity and Infinite Grace

Early on in his ministry, the Apostle Paul faced a predicament. He had been traveling the Mediterranean preaching and forming churches but without any formal connection to the first Christian leaders in Jerusalem. Traveling to the city to receive “the right hand of fellowship,” a division of labor was agreed upon. Paul would be the apostle to the Gentiles, and Peter would be the apostle to the Jews. This accord, however, came with a small caveat: that Paul would always “remember the poor.”

While Paul reports that this addendum of charity was what he had been eager to do, it nevertheless reflects a pressing anxiety of the Jerusalem leaders. Extending the right hand of fellowship to the Gentiles might lead Paul to neglect the poor in the process. Perhaps in becoming “all things to all people,” this evangelist might also come to abandon the traditionally Jewish concern for the poor?

The Jerusalem leaders’ anxieties about Paul were unfounded, but their deep reservations of the Gentiles were justified. Gentile distrust, if not disdain, of the poor was common. Roman society was rigidly stratified, with the wealthy and educated having little to no sympathy for those below them. The philosopher Aristotle deemed laborers ill-fit for the practice or exercise of virtue, their minds as deformed as their physical bodies from the toll of manual labor (Aristotle, Pol., 8.2). A few centuries later, the philosopher Cicero likewise remarked that no respectable citizen would ever be so vulgar as to actually work for a living (De Officiis 1.150). Those who had to beg for sustenance resided even further down the social hierarchy. The poor were as ubiquitous as they were despised by the cultural elites. They were far more often ignored than they were remembered.

In Roman times, one of the foremost thinkers on charity was the first-century Stoic philosopher Seneca. For Seneca, the mutual exchange of gifts is the substance of any relationship. A good gift is one that then enables this voluntary reciprocity. Gifts of charity for the poor, to Seneca, do not meet his high standards of prudence. He writes, “Who has ever called a morsel of bread a benefit, or a coin tossed to a beggar, or the means of lighting a fire?” (De Bene. IV.1.29) However prized these gifts might be to the poor, they are beneath the affluent giver.

More significantly, Seneca strongly cautions against wasteful, indiscriminate gift-giving. No, the recipient must be a suitable choice for another’s benefaction. This, he believes to be “the most important of all … I should confer the benefit for the sake of him whom I wish to receive it, that I should judge him worthy of it” (De Bene. IV.1.29). The benefactor is to be judicious rather than liberal with his or her gifts. One mustn’t choose the wrong person but be discriminate in their selection of beneficiary. The indexing of criteria Seneca employs here is extensive: “I shall choose an honest, plain man, with a good memory, and grateful for kindness; one who keeps his hands off other men’s goods, yet does not greedily hold to his own, and who is kind to others” (I.4.11). If Seneca acknowledges that a worthy recipient might (surprisingly) turn out to be a poor person, it is significant to note that one’s desperate need of a gift has little to no bearing on whether they might be given it. A wise gift should be given to a suitable, worthy candidate, and one’s need was not itself sufficient to elicit another’s benevolence.

By contrast, Paul and the early Christians committed themselves to always “remembering the poor,” recklessly so. If the Greek and Roman practice of benefaction was only given to fellow citizens or members of the same club, the early church gave provision to all (Gal 6:10). If the Gentiles felt no social obligation to support the poor, the Christians did so readily. Widows and orphans were cared for and protected. The destitute who died were given a proper burial. The early Christians would rather skip a meal and fast than see someone else go hungry.

This redistribution of financial and material benefit became for early Christians a hallmark of their practice, renowned at the time because of its eccentric character. One of Christianity’s earliest detractors was confounded by their generosity, noting that “[Christians] despise all things indiscriminately and consider them common property, receiving such doctrines traditionally without any definite evidence” (Lucian, Peregr. 13). So lavish and reckless was the Christian practice of benefaction that Lucian suspected the Christians were likely defrauded by those who wished to enrich themselves on the pretense of their poverty. Along the same lines, the third-century philosopher Porphyry ridiculed those Christians who “lose their own belongings under the pretext of godliness” (Macarius, Apocriticus III: 5). Christianity’s teachings, he reasoned, must have been invented out of thin air by the poor to deprive the rich of their wealth.

Why were Christians so generous, so indiscriminate in their gifts to the poor? Certainly, part of the answer lies in Judaism’s consistent emphasis on their provision. But for Christians, the reach and vigor of their charity outstripped existing Jewish practices in ways that cannot be accounted for solely by the presence of an ethical ideal. Instead, the early Christians’ eagerness to “remember the poor” is best understood as the horizontal expression of their understanding of divine, vertical grace. Their theology and ethics were mutually reinforcing: Christians were unusually generous because God was unusually generous with them.

Against the backdrop of Roman attitudes to the poor, Christianity’s understanding of divine grace and its implications for social relations is perhaps its most revolutionary concept introduced to the world. Put simply: the Christian understanding of grace flattened social hierarchy and introduced to the Greco-Roman world a new idea of charity that can appear to be utter foolishness.

The early Christians understood that the grace of God is given without regard to any measure of inherent worth, whether it be virtue, gender, wealth, poverty, ethnicity, or nationality. As Paul wrote in 49 A.D., “In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ: there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:26–28). The only entrance requirement of Christianity was not birth, nor descent, nor moral virtue, but simply to receive what has been given in faith.

Christians consequently believed that God gives righteousness to the ungodly, life to the dead, forgiveness to the undeserving. God’s mercy is not indexed against a standard of worthiness but bestowed upon the unworthy and before any movement of the recipient toward the giver. God does not give on account of works but on account of sin and need.

In his own fundraising appeal, Paul makes the connection between grace and charity explicit, deploying economic analogies to describe the life of Jesus in terms that encouraged the church’s generosity: “Because Jesus was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). This rhetorical intertwining of material and spiritual exchange urged, though notably did not command (8.8), the church to materially give to the poor in the same way that Jesus first gave to them.

I was once told that the ability to accept a gift from someone else reflects the degree to which they understand the grace of God, whether one tries to save face by play-acting an initial refusal or maintain their personal honor by insisting upon repayment or a proportional return gift. In a time when self-sufficiency is a near synonym for worth, this is undoubtedly accurate. But the reverse scenario is just as revealing: a calculating and judicious charity likewise reflects misunderstanding of grace.

Grace and charity go hand-in-hand in an inseparable relationship of cause and effect. The poor and helpless in their sin who were given the inestimable richness of righteousness are to be relentlessly liberal and indiscriminate with their possessions — even if, as Lucian notes above, the recipients of this generosity might prove to be charlatans exploiting the “simple-minded” Christians for personal gain.

But the early Christian understanding that grace leads to charity also entails another, more radical insight. The earliest Christians were liberal with their resources precisely because they understood that costly, reckless generosity could not be unwillfully extracted by a rigorous demand to do so. People can be pressured to write a check, but they can’t be compelled to add zeros to the amount. To be as recklessly generous as God is, to be merciful as God is merciful, requires the giver to have first received from God’s own reckless generosity. One cannot imitate God’s benevolence without having benefited from him. It is impossible to give what one has not received. One cannot “remember the poor” if they have not first been made infinitely rich in grace.