Pity For One's Own Sick

Christian Charity and Joy Amidst Suffering

We came across this quotation recently:

It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning.  I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help.  (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know.)

A great many people do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious.  I don't think it is.  We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others; but even while we are doing it, I think we're meant to enjoy our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, your jokes, and the birds' song and the frosty sunrise.

From The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2.

Daily Meditation

Entering into Your Priesthood

Ligonier Ministries

In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther formulated the concept of the priesthood of all believers. Contrary to widespread misconceptions of this doctrine, Luther did not mean to reduce the supernatural concern of personal redemption to a core or essence of social concern.

In reaction to the modernist-fundamentalist controversy, many evangelicals, zealous to retain the biblical concern for personal redemption, began to minimize or even reject the social agenda of the New Testament. Social concern and relief ministry became identified with liberalism. Ministry to the poor, the homeless, the hungry, and the imprisoned was often all-too-willingly surrendered to the state or the liberal church.

This reaction was utterly foreign to and in violation of the clear mandate of Scripture. James wrote concerning the essence of pure religion: “Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world” (James 1:27, NKJV).

Coram Deo

What are you doing to help those around you who are in distress? Are you keeping yourself clean from the world’s pollution, as James admonishes?

Passages for Further Study

Matthew 5:16
James 1:27
Micah 6:8

Deserving Poor

The Salvation Army Has Got It Right

Christians talk about helping the deserving poor.  It is true that such a qualification as "deserving" can cover up an awful lot of unkindness, coldness and uncharitable hardness of heart.  You can always find some reason or other as to why someone is not deserving of help.

Nevertheless, when not employed as a pretext for hardness of heart, the concept is helpful.  There are plenty people who believe they are owed charity by everyone else.  It is their right to get support from other people. Their job, if they think of themselves as having one, is to extract money from other people to sustain them. Deserving poor people are not like that.  They do not particularly appreciate being dependant upon others.  They strive as best they can to better the circumstances of themselves and their families so that they are not a burden upon others.  In other words, the deserving poor are those who are doing the best they can to be self-supporting.

It goes without saying that state welfare is built upon concept that welfare provision is a duty of everyone else, and a right of the recipient.  It proceeds on the idea that society "owes" me and that I have a human right to their support.

Letter From America (About Those Dastadly Missionaries)

Showing Up the Home Team

One of the complaints made by Emperor Julian the Apostate against Christians is that they were so much better and committed to taking care of the poor, the sick, and the indigent than his fellow pagans were.  Echoes of resentment against Christians for their "doing good to all men" are found in several classical Roman authors and writers.  Now it is appearing once again.

Pagans and Christians

Ross Douthat

New York Times

October 3, 2014

Occasionally in the debates about Christianity’s weakened position in American culture, you’ll hear traditionalists and conservatives analogize the Christian situation, now or soon, to the environment the faith faced in its earliest centuries, as an embattled minority in a hostile pagan empire. I’m not a particular fan of this analogy, for various reasons: Not only because lions-and-catacombs imagery risks trivializing the concept of persecution at a time when Christians outside the United States face actual Diocletian-style consequences for their beliefs (and don’t always receive the charity they deserve from their American co-believers), but also because describing contemporary American culture as pagan in the style of the ancient world strikes me as a category error, which underplays the extent to which middlebrow American spirituality is still infused with Christian-ish sentiments and assumptions and ideas, and underplays, as well, just how radically different a thoroughly repaganized society would be from the one we (happily) inhabit today.

All of that said, I wouldn’t want to say that there are never echoes of the ancient world in contemporary religious debates.

As Cold as Self-Righteous Charity

Being Seduced by the Dark Side

Oxfam long ago became seduced by leftwing political ideology.  The trajectory is easy to understand.  A charity is formed to provide relief against famine, aka hunger and malnutrition.  The struggle soon broadens into fighting not just at the bottom of the cliff, but at the top--by which we mean the focus upon preventing or palliating conditions which cause poverty and hunger.   

In every society there are relative disparities of wealth and property.  The facile fix at the top of the cliff is for groups like Oxfam was to begin to advocate for the redistribution of wealth and property as more permanent prevention of hunger.  We call this the first degree of abstraction, representing the initial step towards adopting a left-wing political ideology.

The second degree of abstraction comes when the illuminaries in an organization like Oxfam begin to form the view that fighting hunger at the top of the cliff requires not just paying attention to the socio-economic conditions causing poverty, but focusing upon the power structures, the political regimes which exploit the lower socio-economic sectors, and which use them as tools, keeping them subjected to poverty so they are kept perpetually dependant.   This is the second degree of abstraction into left-wing political ideology--identifying the governments and regimes that are evil exploiters of the poor and vulnerable, and opposing them by the ban and the black-list. 

The third degree of abstraction occurs when organizations like Oxfam begin to exclude certain regimes and practices as inherently evil--regimes that they will ban and boycott to the best of their abilities.  At this point, Oxfam and their fellow-travellers are willing to sacrifice the poor and needy whilst they conduct their politically fashionable campaigns against the fomenters of sin.

Calvin's Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

July 17

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Republished from the OPC Website

Bible Text:
If I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless, when I saw my help in the gate: Then let mine arm fall from my shoulder blade, and mine arm be broken from the bone. —Job 31:21, 22

Devotional:
Let us bear well in mind that if the poor pass before us, and we see their need, and keep our purses shut, so as not to help them, it is a sure sign that we are like wild beasts, and that there is not one spark of pity in us.

We ourselves shall some day feel the same lack of mercy when God sends us afflictions; and although we shall be miserable, no man will be moved by it, but men shall look on us with disdain, and we shall be pushed aside and left utterly destitute. For it is the measure and wages which God is accustomed to give to all who are hardhearted toward their neighbors; according as it is said, that he who is merciless shall have judgment without mercy.

Means of Grace

Breaking Down Paganism

Tertullian on church charitable capacities at the beginning of the Third Century, AD.

"There is no buying or selling of any sort of things of God.  Though we have our treasure chest, it is not made up of purchase money, as of a religion that has its price.  On the month day, if he likes, each puts in a small donation; but only if it be his pleasure, and only if he is able; for there is no compulsion; all is voluntary.  These gifts are, as it were, piety's deposit fund.  For they are not taken thence and spent on feasts, and drinking bouts, and eating houses [as was the case in pagan religious meetings and temples], but to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls of destitute means and parents, and of old persons confined now to the house; such, too, as have suffered shipwreck; and if there happen to be any in the mines, or banished to the islands, or shut up in prisons for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God's Church, they become the nurslings of their confession."  [Tertullian, Apology, Chapter 39.  Cited in Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion (New York: Harper One, 2011), p. 113.]

True Witness

A Clear, Pure Sound

Daily we are confronted with man's inhumanity to man--whether it be the image of a baby flushed alive down the toilet in China, or killing late term aborted babies who survived the horror of the "doctor's" ministrations, or the sectarian violence amongst Muslims in the Middle East, or a thousand other manifestations large and small.  It was the same in the Roman Empire. 

Against this tide of ethical degradation stood the Christian Church.  In the middle of the third century yet another plague struck, decimating cities.  The way Roman society treated the sufferers was deplorable, but expected.  Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria, writing around 250AD, described how the populace responded to the plague in that city:

Oliver Twist's Worst Nightmare

   

Budgets and Beggars

In New Zealand, national budgets in the parliamentary Westminster tradition are presented annually to the parliament and the people.  We feel compelled to make this rather basic point because many of the US readers may be confused, since in the United States the Federal Government can stagger on for decades it would seem without a budget stipulating spending and revenue.

Budget times in New Zealand have historically been occasionally dramatic.  When the government ran the economy more tightly than an Eastern European sphincter most folk in the country furtively huddled around the radio on Budget night waiting to see if some dramatic announcement would be forthcoming.  Sometimes instantly, whilst we were all supposed to be sleeping, the currency would be devalued twenty percent by legislative fiat.  Or petrol tax went up forty percent.  Fortunes were made or lost overnight. 

Thankfully Eastern European economics and tyranny were tossed out (at least for a time) early in the nineteen eighties, when the IMF was on the verge of declaring New Zealand bankrupt.

Stakes in the Heart

Limitations of Public Health Exposed

A debate is taking place in the UK about public health.  The cold hard reality is that the UK government has run out of money and its debt levels are worrying.  It has consequently put the squeeze on the public health system.  It now has a duty to raise more money by providing health services to the more wealthy, to those who can pay for medical services and procedures. 

This from The Guardian:

Hospitals are seeking a radical increase in revenue from the treatment of private patients as their budgets come under pressure from the needs of an ageing population, according to new figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.  Great Ormond Street children's hospital has budgeted for an extra £11m from treating private patients in the financial year ending in 2013 compared with 2010 – a 34% increase. The Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is also expecting to boost revenues by £9m over the same period – a 42% rise. The Royal Marsden is expecting an extra 28% increase on 2010 revenues, equating to about £12.7m. Across all trusts an 8% increase in revenues from private patients is expected to be posted for 2012-13 compared with 2010-11.

Previously, successive governments have decried and rejected the idea that state funded health services should generate any money from the more wealthy.  It was a rationing system that was a bridge too far for socialists.

Beneficiary Bashing, or Not . . .

 Some Debates are Just Plain Tiresome

The furore over "beneficiary bashing" is making its seasonal reappearance.  We have grown somewhat bored with the whole thing.  Same old, same old.  Whenever a government moves to put terms and conditions around state payments to some the furore reappears.  It's boring because there is absolutely no way to resolve the issue and move forward.

The reason for the issue's intractability is state welfare benefits are universally regarded as a human right.  The type of right in question can only be regarded as a demand right--although most people use the term "right" crudely without that nuance.   A demand right functions as follows: I have a need (for food, clothing, heating, recreation, etc.) and my need constitutes a right to demand of others that my needs be met.  The enforcer of the demand is the State.

Virtually everyone in New Zealand believes that demand rights are intrinsic to justice itself.

Christian Charity

Unlike Any Other

This from John Calvin:

The Lord commands us to do "good unto all men," universally, a great part of whom, estimated according to their own merits, are very undeserving; but here the Scripture assists us with an excellent rule, when it inculcates, that we must not regard the intrinsic merit of men, but must consider the image of God in them, to which we owe all possible honour and love; but that this image is most carefully to be observed in them "who are of the household of faith," inasmuch as it is renewed and restored by the spirit of Christ.  Whoever, therefore, is presented to you that needs your kind offices, you have no reason to refuse him your assistance.