The Premises of Gospel Poverty

The Premises of Gospel Poverty | Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M. | From Happy Are You Poor: The a Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

Our purpose at the moment is to delve into premises. Political practices and religious teachings cannot be understood except in terms of their root presuppositions. The practical running of a state makes sense only in the light of the assumptions of the people. Revolutions happen not only because policies are unjust but also because radical philosophies differ. Policies flow out of premises. The same is true of religion. Buddhist theory is consistent with its agnostic position a propos of God. Protestantism must accept the fragmenting consequences of private judgment, and Catholic canon law reflects its acceptance of the divine origin of the hierarchical Church.

One badly misunderstands Gospel poverty if he views it as nothing more than a humanistic concern for the downtrodden or as a politico-sociological effort to redistribute the world's resources. The more a man studies evangelical poverty, the more he is struck by the elaborate yet consistent intertwining of doctrinal themes with actual practice.

Our immediate problem is not to show these intertwinings. That I shall do further on. Our real difficulty is the human propensity to judge by sympathies, not by evidence. I fear that some readers will admit the intertwinings during their encounter with these pages but then revert to merely human presuppositions as they continue on through the rest of the book in its practical applications to the various states in life. It is not easy for us to learn that God's thoughts are not our thoughts and his ways are not ours.

In lecture work I have found that I may explain at length and, I think, with clarity, radical revealed premises and then find that when we get to the nitty-gritty applications, some listeners have reverted to their own prosaic premises. Naturally enough, their conclusions are at variance with mine. What is still more disturbing is that many of these people seem unaware that they have either forgotten the revealed roots of the matter (though I had developed them twenty minutes earlier) or that their position is in consistent with those roots. What concerns me is that this chapter may be forgotten as we work through the later ones.

Nonetheless, we hope for the best and present the New Testament premises undergirding its teaching on the use and misuse of material goods. Once these are granted, the rest of this volume makes perfect sense. Nothing else does.

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