The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  Charity is what is done for others because of what has been done for us. Because the Christian has been from creation onward the object of God’s charity, the Christian is obliged to translate that into a care and concern for the neighbor, the orphan, the alien, the stranger, and all those in need. Charity is an obligation on the part of the Christian, but charity cannot be “earned” by those who receive it, and thus the Victorian concept of the “deserving poor” is contrary to the spirit of Christian charity, as, in its first impulse, charity is not a response to the condition of the neighbor, but to what God has done for us. Charity is enjoined upon each of us, not simply upon the rich, or upon those who can be said to be able to afford it. The widow’s mite is a telling moral of Jesus’ that charity does not proceed from abundance or from surplus giving but rather from one’s proportionate ability to respond to the need. Just as God does not restrict divine charity to the rich but blesses rich and poor alike, neither are the poor exempted from acts of charity; and it is certainly expected of the rich. It is to this responsibility for good works that Paul speaks when in II Corinthians he writes:

  Each one must do as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that you may always have enough of everything and may provide an abundance for every good work. (II Corinthians 9:7–8)

  The concept of philanthropy is closely akin to that of charity, and means “the spirit of active goodwill toward others as demonstrated in efforts to promote their welfare.” Alas, while charity has retained something of its private, interpersonal character, philanthropy has assumed an almost exclusively institutional personality, and is often confused with “fund-raising” or “development” or “institutional advancement.” The word, however, means “love to mankind,” and works of philanthropy proceed not from necessity but from love. Personal philanthropy is so easily lost in the large corporate culture of philanthropy, in the large foundations, social service agencies, and the government, that the personal investment in good works is often lost. Or worse, the view obtains that only the rich can be philanthropists, thus absolving most ordinary people from their charitable responsibilities and depriving them along the way of their philanthropic opportunity.

  At the 1996 Harvard Commencement this lost dimension of philanthropy was recovered in the awarding of an honorary degree to Oseola McCarty, a black laundress from Mississippi who scrimped and saved from always meager resources to provide a scholarship of $300,000 to the local historically black college, so that she might help someone. Honored just before Miss McCarty was perhaps America’s most generous philanthropist, Walter Annenberg, whose benefactions to American higher and secondary education are the largest ever given by one individual. When it came time to present the honorary degree to Miss McCarty in the wake of Ambassador Annenberg’s, the university marshal began, “Mr. President, we have with us today another philanthropist…” The choice of words was deliberate; and more than her gift, Oseola McCarty has given new life to the notion that philanthropy proceeds not from great resources, or in response to great need, but out of great love.

  Stewardship is the word these days with which the Christian community speaks of charity and philanthropy. It is an important word and concept, for the very word steward makes it clear that we are but temporary custodians of that which is another’s, and that because it is not ours but another’s we must therefore be prudent and responsible in its administration. Stewardship then is an action of trust that becomes the means by which philanthropy is practiced upon the impulse of love. Christian stewardship has long adopted the Hebrew notion of the tithe as the basis for its allocation of resources to the works of charity and the church. Ten percent of what one has “belongs to the Lord,” and is therefore meant to be returned. The first mention of the concept of the tithe or tenth occurs in Genesis 14:17–20, and the next reference is found in Genesis 28:18–22, where Jacob promises to God “…of all that thou givest me I will give the tenth to thee.” Early in Christian times the tithe was extended to include all income including money, and by Augustine’s time the tithe was understood to be an acceptable though minimum standard of giving for Christians, mindful that Jesus had told the rich ruler to give “all,” and that Ananias and Sapphira, the less-than-forthcoming Christian couple in the communal church, had been struck down by God for lying about the amount of money they had to give to the apostles.

  A New Concept of Wealth

  Wealth is usually understood to be necessary for the undisputed possession of material things, which in turn give advantage and security in the world. Among other things, wealth also confers status and power, with even its symbols having the power to confer status. Hence, in the Greedy Eighties, such status symbols as Rolex watches, Lexus automobiles, second and third homes, cellular telephones, and the right schools for the kids were all taken to be symbols of wealth. Wealth was also necessary to acquire and maintain those symbols, and getting and spending was decreed to be simply the expression of the American dream. When Gordon Gekko in Wall Street said that “greed was good,” audiences didn’t hiss: they cheered with approval.

  The Greedy Eighties have yielded to the Needy Nineties, and materialism is not all that it is cracked up to be. “There’s an overemphasis on material goods. Like home computers. You’re always having to add things to them. Or furniture. You buy things just because of how they will look when people come to your house. It’s easy to allow money to corrupt you.” Sociologist Robert Wuthnow reports this and many other anxieties about materialism and the modern concept of wealth in his article “Pious Materialism: How Americans View Faith and Money,” in The Christian Century, March 3, 1993.7 The good life for so many for so long meant having everything one wanted, whether one needed it or could afford it. Those wealthy by that standard tended to regard any act of charity, philanthropy, or stewardship as an invasion of their resources, and thus lived upon the principle “I’ve got mine, you get yours.”

  This good life, as people are discovering more and more, is simply not good enough. When virtue is divorced from value, everyone suffers, but they suffer most who thought that possession would lead to pleasure and to security. They require a new concept of wealth, and there is one ready and waiting for them in the Bible. Wealth is not what you have; wealth is what you have been given that enables you to give to others. This is what the Bible calls “being rich toward God,” from the story of the foolish man in Luke 12 who thought himself so prosperous that he pulled down his old barns in order to build bigger ones: “God said to him, Tool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.” (Luke 12:20–21) The Christian’s wealth consists primarily of his or her “creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life,” as The Book of Common Prayer’s General Thanksgiving has it, “…but above all…for the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.” To be “rich toward God” is to realize that this is the only wealth that counts. Wealth is thus neither having nor getting. Wealth for the Christian begins with receiving that which God is generous enough to give, and from that wealth all charity proceeds.

  Receiving in Order to Give

  I learned this lesson the hard and vivid way. When I was a young teacher at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, from 1968 to 1970, I was often invited to preach in the pulpits of small, rural, black Baptist churches in Macon County—tiny, hard-scrabble places that rejoiced in such mellifluous names as Mount Pisgah, Zion’s Hill, St. John of Patmos, and Ebenezer. In these places they paid the preacher by taking up a “love offering” for him immediately after the sermon, and it became something of a referendum on preacher and sermon alike. The people were usually generous-hearted, and grateful for the attentions and efforts of a young man new to the ministry and to them. Early on, I refused these offerings on the groun
ds that these poor people and their poor church needed the money more than I did since I had a decent salary from the institute, after all, and it was my pleasure to give. In fact, it made me feel quite morally superior to decline these gifts, and to give them back. I knew even then that giving was essentially an expression of power, and that it was power perhaps more than charity, philanthropy, or stewardship that caused me to refuse the offerings of the people.

  In the nicest possible way I boasted of my practice to the formidable dean of women at Tuskegee, who had become a friend and mentor, and was herself a preacher’s widow. She was not impressed. In fact she upbraided me without mercy for my arrogance. “Who are you,” she thundered, “to refuse to accept the gift of these humble people? You have given insult by refusing to let them do what they can for you.” I, for a change, was speechless. She then concluded with a phrase that will remain with me all of my days: “You will never be able to give until you learn how to be a generous receiver.” Jesus himself could not have put it better, and he was perhaps easier on the rich ruler than Dean Hattie Mae West Kelly was on me. Never again did I refuse to accept a love offering, and it was then, I think, that I first got an inkling as to what wealth was about.

  You may wonder what happened with my rich Texans? They didn’t like a word I had to say, but I certainly got their attention with a little help from Jesus’ words on wealth in the New Testament; and when one talks about money and faith, that is no small beginning.

  Chapter 15

  The Bible and Science

  THE name of William Wisner Adams is not much of a name to conjure with these days. No theological system bears his name, and he left no literary legacy, but at the turn of this century in the prosperous mill city of Fall River, Massachusetts, hometown of Lizzie Borden, the most famous non-murderer before O. J. Simpson, the Reverend Dr. Adams achieved a modest fame by preaching an annual sermon on the latest developments in astronomy. When asked why he went to such extravagant efforts to lay the most sophisticated study of the stars before his congregation of mill hands and bourgeois swamp Yankees who could pretend to neither an understanding of nor interest in the subject, Dr. Adams is said to have replied that he did it because it enlarged his view of God. He probably took as his text Psalm 19, whose opening verses are the most comprehensive and capacious in all of scripture:

  The heavens declare the glory of God; and the

  firmament sheweth his handiwork.

  Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night

  sheweth knowledge.

  There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not

  heard.

  Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words

  to the end of the world.

  In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun…

  For Dr. Adams, and Christians like him, there could be nothing in science unsettling to religion or to the Bible if one understood that the Bible was merely an effort, and a metaphorical effort at that, to cram into the human imagination the unimaginable immensity of God. In Psalm 8:3–4, the Psalmist asks the great question,

  When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

  What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

  The human place in the divine creation, the cosmic scheme of things, is “a little lower than the angels.” In the book of Job it is the thundering voice of God himself who puts Job, and hence all humanity, in proper perspective to the divine immensity. To Job’s whimpering claims of upright victimization, God speaks out of a whirlwind and asks, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” Then God asks the great question, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding.” (Job 38:2, 4) For four thundering chapters God describes his divine prowess, and the inability of a mere human creature to comprehend it. It is an awesome display of power, an intimidation that should warn off the pretentious and the arrogant. It is fire from the nostrils of a dragon aroused, and Job, suitably chastened, knows when to back off:

  I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be thwarted…. Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know…. I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes. (Job 42:2–4)

  It seems, and it is, an unequal match; the anthropomorphic deity of Hebrew scripture is no cozy Creator who dotes on creatures who flatter him with their questions and attentions. This is a force beyond nature itself, a force to be reckoned with, remote, powerful, capricious, revealing only that which he wishes to reveal. This is no cozy universe, no user-friendly creation, no situation in which the Creator is created in the image of the creature. To consider such a God does indeed require an enlarged imagination, and the language of that imagination is an ironic combination of science and poetry. It is not metaphysics but metaphor that opens the finite mind to the infinite God. These old Hebrew prophets seem to have an instinct for understanding this and expressing it, an instinct that seems often to have eluded perceptually challenged Christians who are always trying to “make sense” of things, and who risk the devastation of their faith when they cannot do so.

  The Culprit Science

  The conventional wisdom is that modern science has rendered the Bible, and hence the religion based upon it, obsolete. Before we really knew what we really know, so the argument goes, religion in general and the Bible in particular filled in the gaps and provided necessary answers for needy people; but now we know more and we know better. Science and its ability to determine what we know, its capacity to organize and test what we know, even the scientific basis of how we know what we know, are all seen not simply as threats to the authority of religion, the church, and the Bible, but to all intents and purposes as successors to them. At the center of all of that knowledge, of course, is no longer “god,” but man, who has in fact now become God. That knowledge which was forbidden Adam and Eve and got them expelled from the Garden of Eden is now ours, and we have become as gods, realizing God’s first and worst nightmare.

  It is little short of amazing how widespread and virtually unchallenged is this theory of the supersession of secular knowledge, that the Bible and nearly all that comes from it is left only for those who do not know any better. Over the years of my ministry at the center of a great research university, the most frequent topic of conversation with people on their way into or out of organized religion is the credibility of the Bible in the light of modern science. Those considering the Christian faith wonder if they have to suspend their intellectual faculties in order to take the Bible seriously, and those on the way out often say that they can no longer sustain a biblical faith that seems antithetical to science and a scientific worldview in which biblical faith, if examined, seems unable to withstand the scrutiny. Most of my Roman Catholic friends are embarrassed by their church’s historic hostility to the scientific revolutions of the modern age, and when Pope John Paul II allowed the possibility of error in the church’s condemnation of Galileo, that gesture, long overdue, simply reanimated one of the darkest chapters in the church’s long history. Liberal Protestants, nearly an endangered species, continually worry that Descartes was right and the secular world no longer has need of the divine hypothesis, and evangelicals either ignore the issue altogether, or are still retrying the Scopes trial, this time with better “scientific” evidence for William Jennings Bryan. The whole enterprise of so-called “creation science” or “creationism,” fundamentalism’s answer to Darwin, by its very nature still concedes that science is the only game in town. The Bible’s credibility has been destroyed by science, so goes the argument; therefore, only science can restore the Bible’s credibility.

  A secular friend, in the spring of 1996, asked me if my religious view of the world could possibly be the same after Time magazine reported the discovery of new planets, and the
possibilities of life in the cosmos. She was not a scientist, I should add, but an informed humanist, and she was impressed with the cover story of February 5, where Time asked, “Is Anybody Out There? How the discovery of two planets brings us closer to solving the most profound mystery in the cosmos.” What a silly question, I thought, but when I read the “thought piece” by Paul Davies, “The Harmony of the Spheres,” I saw, as they say, where she was coming from. “These issues,” says Davies, on the possibility of the discovery of extraterrestrial life, “cut right across traditional religious dogma. Many people cling to the belief that the origin of life required a unique divine act. But if life on earth is not unique, the case for a miraculous origin would be undermined.” He then goes on to deal with the damage this discovery could do to Christianity’s central doctrine of the Incarnation. Was this event unique in the universe, as offical doctrine insists, or did God take on alien flesh too? Is Christ the Savior of humans alone, or of all intelligent beings in our galaxy and beyond?