Professor Steve Walton and Dr. Hannah Swithinbank were recently interviewed about the starting point and development for their newly published book, Poverty in the Early Church and Today: A Conversation. The book examines key themes related to poverty in both ancient and modern contexts, with contributions on each issue from leading scholars of early Christianity and leading figures in fundraising and policy-making.
How would you describe your book in one sentence?
It is a conversation about poverty and its alleviation in a Christian context between the thinking and actions of the earliest believers and Christians today.
What drew to you writing about this subject?
The idea came out of an after-church conversation about the lack of engagement between the early churches’ and modern Christians’ responses to people in poverty. This thought led to a conference sponsored by the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible at St Mary’s University, Twickenham (London), and two Christian agencies working in poverty alleviation, Tearfund and Caritas (Diocese of Westminster). The conference featured a creative conversation between experts in the earliest church and experts on Christian engagement with poverty today. The speakers worked in pairs, focusing on the same theme from these two perspectives, and the book contains revised versions of their talks and responses to each other, to convey some of the back-and-forth of the conversations.
How long have you been researching it? How did you come to study it?
The conference took place in December 2015 after eighteen months of preparation and discussion between the three sponsors, so it’s had quite a gestation period. The conversations at the conference were very significant, and led to review and revision of the essays. The book is the final product of that process, and it is stronger as a result.
The topic, of course, is of perennial interest: not for nothing did Jesus say, ‘You will always have the poor among you’ (John 12.8). The earliest Christians were known for their concern for people in poverty, reflecting their Master’s concerns—indeed, at times they shamed the Roman state into taking action, as Christopher Hays notes in his essay. Christians today are among the leaders in engaging with development and transformation work among the world’s poorest people. However, there has been little connection, and little joined up thinking between ancient and modern believers, and that was the spark which produced the book. We wanted to see what we could learn by bringing these two perspectives together in creative conversation.
What does your book focus on that hasn’t been explored elsewhere?
The bringing together of experts on the ancient world and today’s world in conversation is a unique feature of this book—hence the subtitle ‘A Conversation'. The book is not intended to produce simple ’The early Christians did this, so we today should do this too’ solutions, but rather to place the ancient and modern practices, contexts and issues side-by-side in order that they will mutually inform each other. Thus our writers study the causes of poverty, benefaction, patronage, fundraising, the dehumanization caused by poverty, the category of the ‘undeserving poor’, and the responsibilities of church and state for people in poverty. The whole volume also includes a discussion of theological understandings of poverty, a case study of a Christian university and its commitment to engaging with people in poverty, and two responses to the whole collection—one by a biblical scholar and one by a scholar of contemporary society. We think this models a way of doing Christian thinking and reflection today which can be transferred into many other areas, as well as informing Christian responses to poverty today.
What do you hope that people will learn by reading this book?
We hope they will gain greater understanding and concern about poverty, and that these things will lead to greater, and more informed, action by Christians today in reducing and eliminating the scourge of poverty from our world. We’d love to see social and political engagement by Christians in the West with their sisters and brothers in the developing world in ways which will be transformative, and which will equip and enable both groups of Christians to live in a more generous, Christ-like way in engaging with poverty. We’re excited at the prospect of groups of Christians in churches, parachurch organisations, colleges and universities, and other settings reading this book and talking about poverty in ways which will lead to reflection, action, and prayer.
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