Jordan Ballor has an intriguing post on “the relationship between the church’s approach to charity and the creation of the welfare state” as discussed in Lester DeKoster and Gerard Berghoef 1980 book, The Deacons Handbook: A Manual of Stewardship:
DeKoster and Berghoef argue in “The Church and the Welfare State” that “The Church is largely responsible for the coming of the modern welfare community.” But they also contend that the diaconal office is the key to answering the challenge posed by the welfare state: “The Church could be largely responsible for purging welfare of its faults and problems. IF enough deacons caught the vision!”
The church helped to bring about the welfare state in two ways. First, the Church embodied the idea of loving self-sacrifice in service of others. “The Word which the Church proclaims demands charity and justice for the poor. As this Word has permeated at least the Western world, an alerted public conscience has demanded public welfare,” write DeKoster and Berghoef. “The Church is the parent of the welfare community.”
But this “welfare community” became secularized when the Church “did not, and perhaps in some respects could not, measure up to her own ideals. Not all the starving were fed, not all of the homeless given shelter, not all of the oppressed and exploited relieved. The cries of the needy ascended to heaven. The Lord answered with the welfare state. The government undertakes to do what the Church demands and then fails to achieve by herself.”
In this sense, the welfare state is understood to be God’s preservational (thus imperfect) answer to the failed duty of the Church:
Thus the Church is, both by commission and by omission, author of the welfare state. Deacons start from here. Government has undertaken to do what conscience, tutored out of the Scriptures, demands but fails, through the Church, entirely to achieve.
December 9th, 2009 | 11:49 am
[...] First Things, The Acton Institute’s PowerBlog discusses the Christian origins of the welfare state: The [...]
December 9th, 2009 | 2:05 pm
Perhaps this is obvious to all, but after reading the articles, I found myself considering the confusion of goals. The Christian ideal is the perfection of self – and that requires that the need of your neighbor must be of greater importance to your self than the possession of material goods. So you give of your possessions to the needy, out of charity.
The goal of the welfare state, on the other hand, is to see that no one is needy – a different goal. This creates a number of conflicts…the obvious one is that by its greater power, the state has the ability to take from those to have to give to those who have not, whether those who have choose to give or not. That results in removing any morality to the action of “giving”. Another result is that if we could theoretically reach the perfection of all having the same basic needs met, there would be no need for charity – thus no need to separate one’s self from the desire to posses material goods.
Thirdly, it makes the primary purpose of existence to live at a certain level of comfort, and anything that would reduce that level would be “immoral”. I suspect that that alone would lead to decisions that we would – or should – consider immoral.
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