ABSTRACT
In different societies and generations, Christians have come to very different conclusions about the attitude to poverty required of them by their religion. Biblical maxims on the subject, although they may serve as general guides, rarely have self-evident applications. To the socialist, ‘Love thy neighbour’ has appeared to be a manifesto of his own social faith; but a Christian may well doubt it. ‘Love’ may not mean ‘treat as an equal’: do we not speak of loving animals? Even if Luke's ‘Blessed are the poor’ is an accurate report and Matthew's ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ is not, it is one thing to pronounce blessing and another to recommend any change in social arrangements. True, Jesus spoke harshly of the rich and ordered them to perform acts of self-sacrifice and philanthropy so extreme that few rich Christians have ever taken the command literally; but the recorded sayings of Jesus about riches and poverty are ambiguous. It is not surprising, therefore, that the secular circumstances of Christians have affected their responses to poverty, or that the New Testament has provided texts for the social revolutionary and for his enemies.
