Dr. Stanley Hauerwas suggests that the apostles’ request for Paul to remember the poor should be at the heart of Christian living.
“Care for the poor was thought by Paul to be a necessary hallmark of the corporate life of Jesus’ followers,” said Hauerwas, theological ethics chair at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, in a Nov. 10 address at Bluffton University.
Hauerwas, a professor emeritus at Duke University Divinity School and named as “America’s Best Theologian” by Time magazine in 2001, delivered the annual Keeney Peace Lecture at Bluffton.
While he suggests that charity is central to the Christian faith, the intentions and effectiveness of charitable giving are often broadly challenged. “Almsgiving is indicative of what it means to be a Christian, yet how Christians have cared for those who have had less has recently come under severe criticism,” he told the audience.
“We seem to be living in a time where people have lost confidence in giving,” which can be attributed to four criticisms of charity, Hauerwas said.
The first criticism is that poor planning causes aid to be ineffective in helping the poor. “Money is simply thrown at the problem with little idea of how the money could best used to make a positive response to a definite need,” he elaborated.
But even when the aid is properly planned, charitable giving can still be panned as an inherently negative process. “Aid creates dependency, and those who receive that aid cannot be easily rectified,” he said, paraphrasing the criticism.
The third criticism of charity is that it cannot actually fix poverty. “Aid simply is a bandage on a wound that is much deeper than aid can address,” and cannot overcome unjust global economic structures, he continued. “Globalization is but another name for capitalism in which those who have can continue to have, and those who do not have can do little to counter the power of the haves.”
And finally, some people believe that the practice of almsgiving is just not designed to work in our world. It is said that “the bottom line is, the poor got left out of the development of advanced economies, and there is little one can do to rectify that reality,” Hauerwas noted.
Even disaster relief efforts are criticized by some as convenient ways for developed countries to pursue imperialist goals in other countries, leaving charity works in other nations to feel like “agents of foreign policy,” he said.
But amid the doom and gloom of charitable giving, Hauerwas believes that charity is an intrinsic part of Christian life that is rooted more deeply than acts of kindness. “Charity for us is not just another way to be kind to someone less fortunate than ourselves,” he said.
For him, charity is an act of giving to God—like an act of worship—as much as it is an act of giving to those in need. “In Proverbs 19:17, we’re told whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord and will be repaid in full by the Lord,” he related. “To give to the poor is not just another act of charity, but rather an encounter with God.”
And because charity brings us closer to God, it is for every Christian, not just the well-off, Hauerwas asserted. “Nothing I have said means that to be a Christian is not to be obligated to be charitable. That’s true also whether you are rich or poor, healthy or ill, old or young, male or female, oppressed or free, established or disestablished,” he said.
“Indeed, it is particularly important that Christians who are poor understand that they, too, must be charitable. To be poor does not mean to lack the means to expend charity to another. You may lack money or food, but you have the gift of friendship to overcome the loneliness that hits the lives of so many,” he told the audience.
To begin helping the poor effectively, Hauerwas calls Christians to practice the discipline of listening as part of their worship. “We must listen to the stories that the poor have to tell, because only by listening to such stories will we have the means to know how to go on,” he said.
“It is crucial to remember that for the church, the care of the poor cannot be separated from our worship of God. Worship makes possible, I hope to suggest, that Christians have the time to be with the poor, but even more strongly, Christians can imagine being poor,” he said.
Bluffton’s Keeney Peace Lectureship was established in 1978 by the family of William Sr. and Kathryn Keeney to express appreciation for Bluffton’s influence and to strengthen the continuing peace witness among the community.
