{"id":147,"date":"2018-10-17T01:39:52","date_gmt":"2018-10-17T01:39:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dormitionpress.org\/?p=147"},"modified":"2018-10-17T01:39:52","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T01:39:52","slug":"poverty-individual-charity-and-societal-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dormitionpress.org\/?p=147","title":{"rendered":"Poverty, Individual Charity, and Societal Action"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Vladimir
Vladimir Solovyev<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Men have imagined that the acknowledgement of the divinity of Christ relieves them of the obligation of taking His words seriously. They have twisted certain texts of the Gospel so as to get out of them the meaning they want, while they have conspired to pass over in silence other texts which do not lend themselves to such treatment. The precept \u201crender to C\u00e6sar the things that are C\u00e6sar\u2019s, and to God the things that are God\u2019s\u201d is constantly quoted to sanction an order of things which gives C\u00e6sar all and God nothing. The saying \u201cMy Kingdom is not of this world\u201d is always being used to justify and confirm the paganism of our social and political life, as though Christian society were destined to belong to this world and not to the Kingdom of Christ. On the other hand, the saying \u201cAll power is given Me in Heaven and Earth\u201d is never quoted. Men are ready to accept Christ as sacrificing Priest and atoning Victim; but they do not want Christ the King. His royal dignity has been ousted by every kind of pagan despotism, and Christian peoples have taken up the cry of the Jewish rabble: \u201cWe have no king but C\u00e6sar!\u201d Thus history has witnessed, and we are still witnessing, the curious phenomenon of a society which professes Christianity as its religion but remains pagan not merely in its life but in the very basis of that life.<\/p>\n

Economic slavery, even more than slavery properly so called, has found its champions in the Christian world. Society and the State, they maintain, are in no way bound to take general and regular measures against pauperism; voluntary almsgiving is enough; did not Christ say that there would always be the poor on Earth? Yes, there will always be the poor; there will always be the sick, but does that prove the uselessness of health services? Poverty in itself is no more an evil than sickness; the evil consists in remaining indifferent to the sufferings of one\u2019s neighbor.<\/p>\n

This desire to limit the social action of Christianity to individual charity, this attempt to deprive the Christian moral code of its binding character and its positive legal sanction is a modern version of that ancient Gnostic antithesis (the system of Marcion, in particular) so often anathematized by the Church. That all human relationships should be governed by charity and brotherly love is undoubtedly the express will of God and the end of His creation; but in historic reality, as in the Lord\u2019s Prayer, the fulfilment of the divine will on Earth is only realized after the hallowing of God\u2019s Name and the coming of His Kingdom. The Name of God is Truth; His Kingdom is Justice. If follows that the knowledge of the truth and the practice of justice are necessary conditions for the triumph of evangelical charity in human society. (Solovyev, 1948, pp. 8-9)<\/p>\n

Vladimir Solovyev<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/h1>\n

Solovyev, V. (1948). Russia and the Universal Church. (H. Rees, Trans.) London: The Centenary Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Men have imagined that the acknowledgement of the divinity of Christ relieves them of the obligation of taking His words seriously. They have twisted certain texts of the Gospel so as to get out of them the meaning they want, while they have conspired to pass over in silence other texts which do not lend … Continue reading “Poverty, Individual Charity, and Societal Action”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[24,23,22,21],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity","tag-christianity","tag-poverty","tag-russia-and-the-universal-church","tag-vladimir-solovyev"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9z6JP-2n","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dormitionpress.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dormitionpress.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dormitionpress.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dormitionpress.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dormitionpress.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dormitionpress.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149,"href":"https:\/\/dormitionpress.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions\/149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dormitionpress.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dormitionpress.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dormitionpress.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}