Charity: the place of the poor in the biblical tradition

What is charity? A random act of individual kindness? In its Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, the Second Vatican Council teaches that the Church “claims the works of charity as its own inalienable right and duty”. Christian charity “should embrace all people and all needs”, namely “those who lack food and drink, clothes, a home, medicine, employment, education or whatever is needed for living a truly human life” and “those who suffer from hardship or ill health, exile or imprisonment”. When Christians give to the needy, they must recognise in them “the image of God” and realise that they give to Christ. In a Christian community, the council teaches in the Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, the celebration of the Eucharist must become “authentic” and “complete” by leading “to the various acts of charity” as well as “to the mutual assistance of missionary activity, and also to the various forms of Christian witness”.

Gary Anderson, Hesburgh Professor of Catholic Theology at the University of Notre Dame, in effect corroborates much of the teaching of Vatican II in a book that explores the biblical theology of charity or almsgiving. Charity is sacral and sacramental. It is an act of worship and of faith in God. Sirach and Tobit are key biblical sources for Anderson to argue for the kinship of sacrifice or “service of the altar” and almsgiving and to point to almsgiving as the summit of the faithful observance of Torah. Christians, moreover, participate in Christ’s merciful self-sacrifice by manifesting that mercy in their charitable acts. They encounter Christ in the poor, for in becoming human he “not only entered into solidarity with humanity at large but identified himself specifically with the poor”. Thus to give alms to the poor is to reverence “the Christological mystery” of the Incarnation.

Despite the book’s subtitle, Anderson directs our attention not so much to “the place of the poor” as to the theological status and effect of alms for the poor. To give alms is to contribute to a heavenly treasury. The foundation of this claim is the “surprising text” that informed Jewish and early Christian thinking about charity: “Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and will be repaid in full” (Proverbs 19:17). This passage is Anderson’s idée fixe, empowering his penetrating interpretation of relevant Old Testament, New Testament, and Talmudic texts. He emphatically cautions against a moral misreading of the passage that misses its metaphysical import. To become God’s creditor means not to oblige God but to believe in God. And “belief in the treasury in heaven is, by extension, belief in the goodness of the world God has made, and in the goodness of the God who made it”.
Acts of charity accumulate as merits in the heavenly treasury and can be transferred to the benefit of the deceased who must still pay to God the penalty for their sins. This takes us to a long-standing bone of contention between Catholicism and Protestantism: the doctrine of purgatory. Anderson clearly believes that purgatory is “a retrievable notion for Christians in the twenty-first century”.

To retrieve the transferability of merits and purgatory Anderson looks for several allies. Jewish sources play the most important role in Anderson’s argument. Tobit, Sirach, and rabbinic writings attest the “durative character of charity”. God will remember a person’s charitable deeds after his or her death. Anderson holds that in Acts 9:36-40 Tabitha’s charitable works, manifested in the tunics that she had woven, merited her resuscitation from death, even though the passage nowhere identifies her handiwork as charity. Purgatory makes sense to the Methodist philosopher Jerry Walls if our salvation requires a sanctifying transformation after death. In the Confessions, Augustine hopes that the forgiveness that his deceased mother Monica showed to others along with prayers offered for her at the altar will, as Anderson concludes, “help convey her speedily to heaven”.

Not all readers will find Anderson’s arguments convincing. At best, human beings can accumulate their own treasury of charitable merits, which God will honour when they die. Anderson’s sources do not provide strong support for the ability of the living to apply their merits in aid of the dead. His study, however, persuasively emphasises the spiritual and theological value of charitable works and may deepen the commitment of readers to embrace “all peoples and all needs” within the divine economy of charity.

Hilmar M. Pabel