The Betrayal of Charity: The Sins that Sabotage Divine Love

Introduction

1 Introduction In chapter 13 of his First Letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul famously praises charity as never-ending and as greater even than faith and hope. As the biblical scholar Richard Hays observes, however, Paul actually devotes most of his attention to charity’s opposites. Hays shows that “the weight of Paul’s interest falls upon the eight negative items in the list, most of which correspond closely to the behavior of the Corinthians as described elsewhere in the letter.”1 Why are the sins against charity so prominent in Paul’s exposition? The answer has been well expressed by William Cavanaugh, adapting the opening line of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract: “Humankind was created for communion, but is everywhere divided.”2 Hays goes on to say that “Paul’s poetic depiction of love’s character is aimed at calling the members of the Corinthian community out of schism and into unity with each other.”3 Read properly, therefore, 1 Corinthians 13 is the very opposite of “all sweetly sentimental notions of love”; instead it sets forth “a rigorous vision of love that rejoices in the truth and bears all suffering in the name of Jesus Christ.”4 As Paul makes clear, we can learn what love requires only by facing the consequences of our lack of love. 2 — The Betrayal of Charity Nonetheless, Hays does not think that charity has enough heft to serve as one of the unifying themes of New Testament ethics . Instead, he chooses the themes of community, cross, and new creation. Because the word “love” rarely appears in Mark, Acts, Hebrews, and Revelation, Hays suggests that “a synthesis of the New Testament’s message based on the theme of love drives these texts to the periphery of the canon.”5 These texts lack the word “love,” but they teach about the cross, which is what love means. Hays is on guard against the contemporary correlation of “love” with “inclusiveness.” If the word “love” lacks the heft that it once had, can its meaning be recovered so that Jesus’ commandment “that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:126 ) reclaims its proper centrality ? Pope Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical Deus Caritas Est is a recent attempt to reclaim the centrality of love. With an eye to sins against charity, he emphasizes the unity and reconciliation that love brings: “Love is ‘divine’ because it comes from God and unites us to God; through this unifying process it makes us a ‘we’ which transcends our divisions and makes us one, until in the end God is ‘all in all’ (1 Cor 15:28).”7 This emphasis on unity appears in Jesus’ promise that the one who loves him will be loved not only by the Son, but also by the Father and the Holy Spirit, so that “we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23). The present book likewise attempts to reclaim the centrality of love for moral theology and indeed for all areas of theology. For this effort I am particularly indebted to St.Thomas Aquinas, who places charity at the center of his Summa Theologiae.Aquinas explains that charity is the friendship that arises when the triune God, who is infinite love, “communicates his happiness to us.”8 Aquinas fills out the concrete meaning of love by examining its effects: interior joy and peace, exterior mercy, beneficence, almsgiving, and fraternal correction. Like Paul, Aquinas’ discussion of charity in the Summa Theologiae also attends carefully to its opposites, among which Aquinas includes hatred, sloth, envy, discord, contention, schism, war, strife, sedition, and scandal. Although in contemporary theology the sins against charity have not received attention as a group, nonetheless each of them Introduction — 3 has a prominent role within specific contemporary discussions. As we will see, hatred comes up in recent critiques of monotheism by such scholars as Regina Schwartz, Laurel Schneider, and Harold Bloom; the problems associated with sloth are raised by Timothy Jackson’s effort to dissociate Christian charity from belief in life after death; envy plays a major role in American understandings of self-reliance, informed by Ralph Waldo Emerson; ecclesial discord and contention form the subplot of John O’Malley’s presentation of the Second Vatican Council’s breakthroughs; Walter Brueggemann and others critique liturgical hierarchy as a masked power play that foments schism; the theology...