Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation by Helen Rhee (review)

In Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (par. 42), Pope John Paul II declared that "the whole tradition of the Church bears witness" to a preferential option for the poor. Most Christians would agree—but if asked to describe or defend that tradition, we find ourselves facing complex historical questions. A vast body of scholarship has explored the tradition's beginnings in the community's early memory of Jesus—pondering his words "Blessed are you poor" and "Woe to you rich"—and in the canonical New Testament. Another huge corpus of literature has grown around the flowering of patristic commentary and the great ecumenical councils of the post-Constantinian church. In this book Helen Rhee focuses on an in-between period, relatively neglected by historians of social ethics, but crucial to our understanding of the issues— the second and third centuries, when the Christian movement was sorting out what and who it was. Debates over what the Church ought to do for the poor and what it should expect from the rich were not only an important part of the movement's growing body of moral teaching, Rhee argues, but also central to the ways it defined its identity.

There is no tabula rasa in the formation of identity, whether of an individual or of a movement. Identity is both positive and negative: not only beliefs, attitudes, and practices that define who we are but also the defining differences from the beliefs, attitudes, and practices of those around us. Even those differences, however, we perceive through filters created by that larger culture. The language we use to describe our differences is the language we share. The identity of a new social movement is thus always being negotiated at its boundaries.

Over the past century, new evidence and, more important, fresh ways of interpreting the evidence have transformed our understanding of the social and cultural world within which the Jesus movement came of age as "Christianity." In her first chapter Rhee provides a succinct, accessible summary of scholarship on social and economic relationships in the Roman Empire and the way those relationships were construed and evaluated by various groups. A very brief section mentions aspects of the Israelite-Jewish tradition of rich and poor (pp. 27-32). In contrast with the comprehensive knowledge exhibited elsewhere by Rhee, these paragraphs are disappointingly thin: most of the references are to commentaries on the Letter of James; no Jewish scholar is cited, and rabbinic sources are ignored. There follows an equally brief sketch of "early [i.e., first-century] Christian teachings and practices" (pp. 32-40) and of "the geographic spread and social situations of Christian communities in the second and third centuries" (pp. 40-48).

The central chapters show how the Church wrestled with issues of poverty and wealth as more of the middling to upper classes appeared among its own members. Using evidence from the Apostolic Fathers; the Alexandrian and North African writers, especially Clement, Cyprian, and Tertullian; the early church-order literature; and some of the apocryphal acts, Rhee organizes her exposition around three theological topics: eschatology (chap. 2), soteriology (chap. 3), and koinonia (chap. 4). It is a rich and complicated story, and Rhee tells it well. The recurrent question is the one formulated by Clement in the title of his well-known treatise, "Which rich man shall be saved?" The answer is, roughly, the one who gives alms to the poor, avoids those vices of luxury and conspicuous love of wealth that the Greco-Roman moralists commonly despised, and supports the growing centralization of power in the bishops. That centralization, and the emergence of the Church as an economic institution, forms the subject of chapter 5. Chapter 6 sums up the findings under the topic "Wealth, Poverty, and Christian Identity." Here again, almsgiving looms large—"as Christian freedom, obligation, and a boundary marker" (p. 171...