God Knows There's Need: Christian Responses to Poverty

Although a concern with poverty is writ large in the New Testament, scholars have paid scant attention to the ways in which early Christian writers addressed economic inequities in the first four centuries of the Common Era. Combining a passion for social justice with lucid exegesis of patristic authors like Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, and Basil of Caesarea, Holman (The Hungry Are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia ) demonstrates that the poor have always been with us and that the church has devised strategies for taking care of them. Holman argues that these writers engaged a response to poverty that involved sensing the needs of the poor; sharing the world with these poor in ways such as, but not limited to, giving alms; and embodying the sacred kingdom, or bringing the brokenness of the impoverished bodies into the body of Christ. For example, the famine that struck Cappadocia in 368–369 left many homeless, ragged and hungry. Gregory of Nazianzus responded by exhorting Christians that these disfigured persons are “part of you, even if they are bent down with misfortune.” Holman helpfully offers fresh insights into the ways that church history can illuminate social activism. (June)