Society & Culture

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Read Part 1.

Except for the hypothetical castaway on a South Seas island, everybody lives in a culture. The creation of culture is hardwired into human beings. They encounter the natural world. They encounter other people. They bring their most fundamental convictions about the nature of reality to bear upon these encounters. The result is a culture, and the qualities of that culture will differ somehow from those of every other culture.

This description of culture is presumptuously brief. From a Christian point of view, it is also theologically deficient. Not false, to be sure—every word of it rings true to Scripture. Nevertheless, more needs to be said.

One of the mistakes that some theologians (and non-theologians, too) make is to try to judge culture in general rather than to evaluate specific cultures. One analyst may suggest that culture shows evidence of divine creativeness, and therefore it is good. Another may argue that it displays the marks of human depravity, and it is therefore bad. Both fail to recognize that every culture is a complex phenomenon that will be powerfully shaped by a number of influences. Some of these influences can be classified under five theological categories.

The first of these theological categories is meticulous Providence. Christians believe that Providence is active in all human affairs, so it should come as no surprise that Providence is reckoned as an influence upon cultures. The problem is that Providence, by definition, works behind the scenes. Looking backwards, Christians simply recognize that Providence ordained whatever actually happened.

Poverty is a bad thing in the eyes of most people—Christians included. But why do we see poverty that way? How we answer that question influences the kinds of things we do to try to reduce or relieve poverty. The why shapes the where, when and how.

So far in this series, we’ve considered briefly what poverty is (relative vs. absolute) and surveyed the causes of poverty in Scripture. We’ve assumed that poverty is a negative that should be reduced as much as possible wherever it exists.

But not everyone sees it that way. From the days of Benedict of Nursia to today,¹ Roman Catholicism has included some who take vows of poverty, and many evangelicals teach that average Christians should increase their relative poverty in order to relieve others’ absolute poverty.² A few imply that the relatively poor (all of us, compared to those who are richer) should become much more poor so that those who are relatively poorer than we are (“the needy around us”) can become less so.³

But Scripture provides reasons to view poverty as a condition we should avoid in our own lives as well as the lives of others.

A wrong reason

Before we consider some of the best reasons to fight poverty, we need to take one faulty reason off the table. Unfortunately, it may well be the most popular reason in the American mind today. The worst reason to fight poverty is, in a word, inequality.