Poverty and Salvation (A Response and a Lead-In)

This is in part a response to an astute point made by Matt Duff on one of Bryce’s previous posts, “The Elusive Ecclesiological Jaguar Shark (Church Hunting, pt. 2)” (October 6, 2008), and it is also in part a lead-in to a Church-and-Politics conversation we’ll be starting later on in the week.

Matt raised some valid points on not overemphasizing the importance of caring for the poor as an integral part of the church's mission. I agree that if we flatten the mission of the church to such a degree that all we are is a food bank we forfeit much of the dynamism of what it means to be a spiritual community. (Not to mention we risk failing at trying to do something that food banks are already doing competently.)

Matt, could I press back against your objections just a bit, and try to articulate why I think attentiveness to poverty and suffering is so important? Since this is a complex issue, and one we certainly can't iron out in a single sitting, I’ll limit myself to two points made by one of my favorite theologians, Gustavo Gutiérrez. Gutiérrez, a Peruvian priest regarded as the father of liberation theology, and made a splash in the early 1970s as a theologian trying to make sense of what it meant for the Catholic Church to seek to give its members spiritual nourishment and yet do nothing to resist oppressive Latin American dictatorships that drove Christians into material and spiritual despair. The movement became well known on a popular level in the late 1980s by the film Romero, a true story about a Salvadorian bishop who was assassinated for standing up to his country’s gross violations of human rights. (A superb and convicting film, by the way. I highly recommend it.)

1. "Salvation history is a single history". What Gutiérrez means by this is that there is not a physical, worldly human story and a spiritual, immaterial story, which can be interwoven at times but are essentially distinct. Rather, there is a single story because humans are not merely ghostly souls trapped in material bodies. Human personhood--according to Hebrew thought and increasingly according to recent neuroscience and philosophy of mind--is certainly a multifaceted phenomenon, but not a cleanly bifurcated one. The spiritual is bound up with the material, and vice versa. Jesus came both healing the sick and casting out demons; he came forgiving sins as well as denouncing exploitation by tax collectors. The mission of Christ was to save bodies as well as souls, and in the end we will be raised from the dead in body as well as in spirit. So I suspect that the urge to downplay material nourishment for the sake of more lasting spiritual nourishment might be working from an artificial distinction.

I was in Ghana once with a group of (relatively affluent) American and Ghanaian Christians who went to an abjectly poor village to preach the Gospel. The members of the village had no plumbing or nearby water source, and had to walk a mile to get water from a standing pond that was visibly contaminated. Half of the kids in the village died by the age of five, and half of the kids that did survive had tapeworms. I wanted to ask, Why don't we buy and install a water well for them at the same time that we preach the Gospel? Wouldn't it be better if more children had the sanitation to grow old and have children of their own, so that the church may be larger and more vibrant? Then we could witness to salvation the way Gutiérrez understands it--a salvation that "concerns all men and the whole of man".

I don’t mean to tell that story to unfairly overstate my case. I do think it is important to recognize the integrity of spiritual and material health, however, and if we should be more consistent in Ghana I think we should be more consistent all the way down the line and apply it to our own churches and to how holistically we conceive of salvation.

2. "The center of the world--so-called because the crucified Jesus dwells there, and with him all who suffer unjustly--is the place from which we must proclaim the risen Lord."

Wanting to be in community with the poor shouldn't be some special treatment we give to one group of people at the expense of another. I agree with Matt that we shouldn't assume that the wealthy don't have needs and privilege the poor out of some disingenuous middle-class guilt. It should go without saying that being wealthy does not preclude a person from a need for spiritual nourishment—when I say suffering I mean suffering of all kinds, including despair, addiction and rejection as well as not being able to afford heating in the winter. This should not be about class warfare and it should not be about base materialism. However, the reason we want to be in community with the poor and suffering is because, like Bryce said, it is a gift. We are better off spiritually when we are nearer to hurt and pain, just as Jesus says, "blessed are the poor" and "blessed are those who mourn". We should be suspicious of the health-and-wealth gospels of the likes of Joel Osteen, which mislead people into thinking that following Jesus is about being happy rather than about taking up our cross. Likewise, we should be weary of church membership that only rounds out our already comfortable lives.

Matt rightly said there is no causation between wealth and righteousness, but it seems to me like Jesus is implying there is causation between poverty and righteousness. He even goes as far as saying it is harder for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to enter the eye of a needle. This is obvious hyperbole, to be sure, but the fact that Jesus gives caution to the extremely rich should at least suggest that there is some causal link between material comfort and spiritual complacence.

I realize I’m setting up a tension here that could easily be interpreted as a contradiction--on one hand I'm saying it's good to hurt, on the other I'm saying we should help those who hurt so they don’t hurt anymore. I think we can live into both sides of this tension in a single motion. We should say to those who suffer, “you are blessed”, while at the same time not letting that be an excuse not to offer a helping hand. We should seek to help the hurting, while at the same time not do so in an effort to “fix them” or to narcissistically recreate them in our own image. As hard as it might seem to do this with integrity, I’m convinced it is what we are call to do, and we have Jesus’ life as an example to follow.

Again, thanks for your comments, Matt, and thanks for stimulating and provoking me into thought. You don’t have to apologize for your lengthy comment, since I’ve obviously overindulged in my own, lengthier response. And feel free to respond with profuse and even lengthier disagreement if you like.

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A Concluding Confessional Caveat

I do not purport to be in any fashion an accomplished 'liberation theologian in practice'. As I write this post I become increasingly insecure in articulating this position, as I have few concrete credentials to adjudicate my claim that theology must display a 'preferential option for the poor'. I have, for the most part, enjoyed reading and writing about liberation theology from the comfort of my padded and clean office in small-town America, quite far from the suffering poor of Gutiérrez's Lima or Romero's San Salvador. Do not mistake this position as a kind of attempt to put on airs about authority that I do not in fact have; rather, I build this case from what I understand the Gospel to be that is preached to me and that lays claim to me. So if I have any say left in the matter, I ask that the reader hear me making a confession of what is still before me, mea culpa, mea culpa.