Poverty: The Christian Response

Extract

Theological Dictionaries are a valuable asset for any preacher. They can usually provide a helpful bibliography or perhaps the germ for preaching or lecturing on most theological topics. The Sacramentum Mundi article on Poverty is no exception; not however, because of its theological profundity, but because of the response evoked by the badness of parts of the section on the moral theology of poverty. Here are some of the offending passages:

In the Western world only isolated individuals lack the bare necessities of life. The understanding of poverty has largely disappeared from these countries. Instead of material poverty we often find other forms of poverty—desolation of heart, a sense that life is meaningless, anxiety, isolation—which must be interpreted as a kind of longing for redemption and love. A Christian who finds these things in himself or in others must accept them in the spirit of Christ as a means of encountering God.

Poverty must first be recognised by the sufferer as a fact. By nature every form of poverty demands admission of one’s own inadequacy. It is part of the human condition that distress can never be altogether abolished, whatever our efforts. . . . Certain privations are thrust upon us.

I think the passages quoted are bad, firstly because of the factual errors they contain, but more seriously because they show a misunderstanding of what Christians understand by poverty and what underlies the Christian’s response. ‘In the Western world only isolated individuals lack the bare necessities of life. The understanding of poverty has largely disappeared from these countries.’ That may be a convenient myth reinforcing the mistaken belief that the Western world is on its great march of progress, but it muffles the truth about the real situation.