own grave.

With such questions, then, we turn to the teaching of Jesus Christ; and at once we are confronted by those principles of his teaching which in their general form we have already recalled. Jesus views the social order from above, in the horizon of the purposes of God; he approaches the social order from within, through the awakening of individual capacity; he judges the social order in its end, as a means to the kingdom of the Father. What has Jesus, then, to say of the contrast which was conspicuous in his time, as it is in ours, between wealth and poverty? Does the possession of wealth appear to Jesus likely to make that kind of man who in his turn may help the kingdom? May a rich man be an accepted follower of Jesus Christ? Or is poverty, on the other hand, of the essence of Christian discipleship, and is a rich man necessarily shut out of the kingdom? What is the teaching of Jesus concerning the rich? 1

No sooner does one ask these questions than he recalls the reiterated and unmitigated language of warning and rebuke with which Jesus addressed the prosperous. "How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!" 2 "Woe "Blessed are ye poor ;"3 that are rich; you "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth;"4 "For a man's life consisteth not in the

unto

1 See also Christian Register, January 5, 1893, F. G. Peabody, "The Problem of Rich Men." 4 Matt. vi. 19.

2 Mark x. 23.

8 Luke vi. 20, 24.

abundance of the things which he possesseth;" 1 "Ye cannot serve God and mammon;' "2 "It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." 8 Few modern agitators, urging the dispossessed poor to resist their oppressors, have ever ventured upon stronger language than this; few, indeed, have gone so far as to say to their followers: "Sell all that thou hast, . . . and come, follow me." It is not surprising that such sayings have been greeted as conclusive testimony concerning the teaching of Jesus, and as establishing his place in history as the great forerunner of modern protests against the industrial system which is based on private capital. "When Jesus," it is confidently asserted, "says, 'Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,' he shows himself on ethical grounds a radical opponent of all accumulation of wealth."5 "The democracy of property, which is the larger revelation of Christ, ... is the condemnation of the wage-system." "6 "If the man who best represents the ideas of early Christians were to enter a respectable society to-day, would it not be likely to send for the police?" 7 "The practice of the preacher-carpenter who had not where to lay his head, who is not re8 Matt. xix. 24.

1 Luke xii. 15.

2 Matt. vi. 24.

4 Luke xviii. 22.

5 Naumann, "Was heisst Christlich-Sozial ?" s. 9.

6 Herron, "The New Redemption," p. 63.

7 Leslie Stephen, “Social Rights and Duties,” I, 21 (quoted by Mathews, "Social Teaching of Jesus," 149 [note]).

corded as having possessed a single coin, who had nothing to leave his mother, and whose grave was borrowed from a friend, accords fully with the message he delivered." 1

Estimates like these of the teaching of Jesus must not be lightly dismissed. There is no way of breaking the force of these solemn sayings of the gospels concerning the deceitfulness of riches, or of eliminating from the teaching of Jesus his stern warnings to the prosperous and his beautiful compassion for the poor. Is it possible, however, that so obvious and so limited a message as this, a teaching so slightly distinguishable from the curbstone rhetoric of a modern agitator, can be an adequate reproduction of the scope and power of the teaching of Jesus? Is it not, on the contrary, more probable that we have here a new illustration of that easy literalism which through all Christian history has distorted and limited the teaching of the gospel? No vagary or extravagance of opinion has been too extreme to claim for itself the authority of the teaching of Jesus, or to fortify that claim through a fragmentary and haphazard eclecticism. The gospels, however, are not a series of disconnected aphorisms; they are the record of a continuous life, whose complete intention is not disclosed in single incidents or detached sayings, but reveals itself in the general

1 Article in The Outlook, December 10, 1898. Compare also O. Holtzmann, "Jesus Christus und das Gemeinschaftsleben der Menschen," 1893, s. 17 ff.

habit and movement of the Teacher's mind. If, then, one seriously desires to know what Jesus thought about the rich and the poor, he must scrutinize, compare, and weigh the scattered sayings of the gospel and derive from them a general impression of the life which gave authority to the teaching; and as he thus passes from the letter of the gospel to its spirit, there may perhaps disclose itself a scope and character of teaching which no isolated saying adequately represents, but which, the more one examines it, draws the learner to the Teacher with a profounder impression of reverent awe.1

As one thus approaches the teaching of Jesus concerning the rich, he is, first of all, confronted by an extraordinary difference of emphasis in the different evangelists.2 The fourth gospel hardly

66

18ter Evang.-soz. Kongress, 1897, Wendt, "Das Eigentum nach christlicher Beurteilung,” s. 10, “ A trustworthy Christian judgment concerning property is to be derived, not from single Biblical utterances or parables, but from the fundamental principles and religious conceptions of Jesus."

...

2 On these notable differences of social teaching see, on the one hand, Keim, “Jesus of Nazareth,” III, 284, “We have [in Luke] gross, naked Ebionitism." "The naked doctrine of poverty." IV. 81, "In the glorification . . . of poverty as such we have the direct reverse of the teaching of Jesus." More moderately, H. Holtzmann, “Die ersten Christen und die soziale Frage," s. 44, "The view of Jesus is of the peril of riches; . . . the view of the third Gospel is that riches are in themselves disgraceful, and poverty in itself saving." On the other hand, Renan, “Life of Jesus" (tr. Allen), Ch. XI, “The Gospel in his [Jesus] thought of it, is for the poor." The Ebionitic note of the third gospel is emphasized, perhaps with exaggeration, by Colin Campbell, “Criti

touches the question of material possessions at all. It moves in quite another world, a world of lofty philosophy, spiritual biography, and Divine communion. With the exception of two unimportant passages 1 the very words "rich," "poor," "wealth," "poverty," "to be rich," "to be poor," do not occur either in the fourth gospel or in the Johannine epistles. The second gospel also, though for opposite reasons - offers practically no material concerning poverty or wealth which does not also present itself either in Matthew or Luke, or in both. The fourth gospel loses sight of these human interests in its flight of spiritual meditation; the second gospel hastens by these general problems of social life in its absorbed and concise records of the words and acts of Jesus. Thus the teaching of Jesus concerning social conditions must be sought almost wholly in the gospels of Matthew and Luke; and here we come upon abundant material.

Yet here also we meet a still more striking

...

cal Studies in Luke's Gospel," 1891, Ch. II. Compare, Plummer, "Commentary on Luke," 1896, p. xxv. "Is there any Ebionism in St. Luke? That Luke is profoundly impressed by the contrast between wealth and poverty is true enough. But this is not Ebionism. He nowhere teaches that wealth is sinful and that rich men must give away all their wealth, or that the wealthy may be spoiled by the poor." Observe also the discussions of B. Weiss, "Life of Christ," Book I, Ch. IV, V; J. Estlin Carpenter, "The First Three Gospels, their Origin and Relations," 1897, Ch.VIII-X; and especially the painstaking and convincing study of Rogge, "Der irdische Besitz im N. T.," 1897, s. 9 ff.

1 John xii. 5; xiii. 29.