Poor Excuse
Frederica Mathewes-Green on Remembering That Even the Poor Can Go to Hell
What happens when Christians are attacked by the contemptuous secular world? Often we start talking about how much good Christians have done. I just encountered this response in a book aimed at non-believers, which builds to a chapter that presents a whole parade of do-gooders to vindicate the Christian faith. Everybody got their paragraph in the sun, from Mother Teresa to Basil the Great to the Liberation Theologians.
It’s a difficult problem in apologetics, I admit, how to win a hearing for Christianity today. The alternatives that worked for earlier generations (describing miracles, explaining how Christ takes away sin) don’t work as well for ours. But I always feel funny when fellow-believers pull out our earthly good works as the trump card. The real purpose of Christianity, after all, is the reconciliation of God and humankind.
We’re a religion, not a social service agency. Even though we do social justice very, very well, that doesn’t mean it’s our most important product.
Distorted Faith
To some extent, we must respond to the world’s challenge in terms the world can understand, and of course the world will be most interested in making things better in the world. While we can answer the world’s challenge in its preferred terms, doing so can distort our faith at subtle levels. Sometimes when I read enthusiastic accounts of how much Christians have done for the poor, I get the uneasy feeling that the poor aren’t being seen as fellow toilers on earth and eventually fellow citizens of heaven, but as a separate, segregated species, a foil for our charity.
In the most egregious cases, the poor are transformed from individuals, with their own quirks and talents and relationships with God, into The Poor, a subgroup of humanity that is passive, homogenous, and apparently perfect. Though most people are saved by faith in Jesus Christ, The Poor seem to get a free pass to heaven thanks to their (privileged?) economic status. And if we do enough good works for The Poor, if we “identify with” them insistently enough, some of their shininess might rub off on us.
I’m not making fun of real-life poor people, who are as varied and worthy of God’s love as people of any economic stratum. Rather, it’s we earnest Christians who are laughable, turning others into an object—or, better, a passive subject—of our eager, self-validating ministrations. We forget our theology and anthropology, we forget the simple human unity displayed in both the Creation and the Fall, and mash everyone together who falls below an income line. Those who get rated Poor are lifted to a pedestal, and used to display our generosity.
The reason, I think, is a theological “usual suspect”: salvation by grace is simply uncomfortable. We would really rather be saved by good works. It’s easy enough to convince yourself that you have done some fine things, and easy enough to find others who haven’t (for example, The Rich, always a satisfying target). If only God was obligated to reward us, contractually bound! We could point to a corral of well-tended Poor and feel quite satisfied.
We’d get a document to file away until it was time to flash it at St. Peter and breeze through heaven’s gate. How pleasant it would be to spend the intervening time admiring our own compassion.
But God is not fooled. He intends to transform us completely, from the deepest inside out. So he asks, not token good deeds, but a relationship: continual prayer, abiding in his presence, taking every thought captive to Christ. The process is intimate, thorough, and frequently uncomfortable. Yet no other means will render us bearers of his glory.
Frederica Mathewes-Green is a columnist for Beliefnet.com and a contributor to the Christian Millennial History Project multi-volume series. Her books include At the Corner of East and Now (Putnam), The Illumined Heart (Paraclete Press), and The Open Door: Entering the Sanctuary of Icons and Prayer (Paraclete Press). She lives in Linthicum, Maryland, with her husband Fr. Gregory, pastor of Holy Cross Orthodox Church. They have three children and three grandchildren.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
25.6—Nov/Dec 2012
The Loss of Aristotelian Logic & the Social, Moral & Sexual Consequences by Peter Kreeft
32.4—July/August 2019
on Single-Mindedness in Durer's Ritter, Tod, und Teufel by Anthony Costello
31.6—November/December 2018
on the Church's Response to the Anti-marriage Tide by Diane Woerner
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
