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Chapter Fourteen: an Evaluation of the Western Church's Teaching On Chapter Fourteen: An Evaluation of the Western Church’s Teaching on Social Stability and Financial Security We can now evaluate whether the church was faithful to the teaching of the apostles about wealth. The church rapidly became more lenient than Jesus regarding wealth, and unfortunately made three major accommodations to the human desire for economic security. Land The Western church made its first accommodation to material insecurity by endorsing land ownership in the agricultural economy . Although it is difficult to generalize about the Middle Ages and medieval European Christendom, I believe it is possible to say that they moved from ‘disinheritance’ and ‘universal giving’ to ‘property stabilization’ and ‘predictable giving’ for the sake of social stability. Every citizen had a role to play in the grand vision of social unity, so the use of wealth was subsumed into that concern. Political officials and nobles played an important role in maintaining social cohesion and peasants, too, were not insignificant. They economically supported the manor, which organized the resources for defense and warfare. William H. McNeill, in The Rise of the West relates the development of the European feudal system to nomadic incursions, mostly from Asia. McNeill believes the feudal manor system developed because it was the most effective way to organize agricultural and military resources to resist this threat. 1 Peasants were taught to submit to their landlords, and everyone in turn needed to submit to the priests. Significant economic inequalities could be tolerated because of this overriding emphasis on social unity. At its inception, Christianity made very minimal concessions to this desire for land. Private property was seen as necessary but sometimes as a hindrance because it sometimes obstructed the Christian vision of devotion to the poor, to Christ, and to the new community in him. Then, as the church grew large, private property was accepted as necessary for social unity. Society was seen as an organism; the metaphor used was the same as Paul’s for the church, the human body. This use of metaphor was no accident. Having baptized society through Constantine’s Edict of Milan, the institutional church now took responsibility for the Empire. Everyone had their place in the social body. This concern for unity dominated theological and philosophical work all the way through Aquinas and the Scholastics. In the church’s effort to maintain this unity, economic stability became a major concern. The church defined itself as a property owner. In AD 506 in Southern Gaul, the Council of Agde forbade abbots or bishops to sell the property of the church, lest they reduce the church’s wealth. Positively, the Council did encourage bishops to free slaves and instructed them to supply manumitted persons with money and land. And, perhaps the Council was concerned for transitioning from operating within the stability of the Roman Empire to the uncertainty of the Germanic tribes. Nevertheless, the Council defined the church itself as a property owner. The Code of Justinian, which that Emperor and his aides finalized in 534 AD to systematize the existing body of Roman law in supposed conformity with orthodox Christianity, and which influenced policy in the west for a millennium, made sweeping changes in property law. Says historian Will Durant, ‘The property of the Church, whether in realty or movables, rents, serfs, or slaves, was declared inalienable; no member, and no number of members, of the clergy or the laity could give, sell, or bequeath anything belonging to the Church. These laws of Leo I and Anthemius, confirmed by the Code, became the legal basis of the Church’s growing wealth: secular property was dissipated, ecclesiastical property was accumulated, in the course of generations.’ 2 Similarly, in regards to land, as the church became an owner of property, it repaid donors of land with a stipend, or rented property to people loyal to it, and offered stern spiritual warnings against those who might have sought to take lands by force. The transition from priestly marriage to priestly celibacy was intertwined with Roman Catholic property concerns. With concerns rising to protect church property from inheritance, children of priests were banned from inheriting church property. Later, all sons of priests were declared illegitimate. In 1022, Pope Benedict VIII banned marriages for priests, and the idea of the celibate priest emerged. Finally in 1139, in the Second Lateran Council, Pope Innocent II voided all marriages of priests and all new priests had to divorce their wives. All this was done to protect money and church property. To peasants and tenant farmers, the church preached submission. In so doing, it reinforced the legitimacy of social inequality. Large landowning families became increasingly wealthy. While the church certainly served the poor and set up hospitals and the like, it saw social inequality as serving the social body; laborers were its feet and hands while other, wealthier groups were its mind, mouth, etc. And it saw social harmony as a higher goal than any other. The church meanwhile needed financial stability the larger and more bureaucratically complex it became. 1 William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1963 and 1991), p.361 – 416 2 Will Durant, The Age of Faith (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950), p.113 Since land was the absolute basis for security in ancient and classical civilizations, providing harvest, rents, and inheritance, the church gradually, in one form or another, stabilized land ownership. The church put its stamp on the arrangement of land between people, meddled with questions of who owned what, and formulated property rights and violations. In fact, by the 1300’s it claimed as a central belief that Jesus and the apostles owned land; not believing this was punishable by excommunication. 3 Whereas Jesus fundamentally challenged Jews in his day to sit loose to their ancestral lands, the church eventually articulated the opposite. Iberians, more so than any other European Christians, imitated Islam in its view of land as possession. Portugal and Spain had very extensive conflicts with the Muslim Moors in the Iberian peninsula, starting from 711 AD when the Muslim Berber commander Tariq ibn-Ziyad led an army of seven to ten thousand Muslims from Morocco across the Mediterranean at its narrowest point to conquer Spain. To resist the Muslim advance, the Iberian Christians retaliated in kind, first militarily. They developed a territorial conviction that the land and people of the Iberian Peninsula should be ‘Christian.’ This Reconquista sensibility did not exist in Christian faith before, since Jesus called his followers to be ‘pilgrims’ and to give up land. But it was an imitation of the Muslim vision of the unity between land, people, and faith in the Muslim God.4 Medieval European Catholicism was consumed with a passion for social unity and stability, the guardianship of an order that, ideally at least, encompassed all institutions and people in European society. Catholic priests embodied the unity of that church society and offered society’s forgiveness by reenacting the cross through a variety of actions: administering the Eucharist, hearing confessions, pronouncing pardon, selling indulgences for redemptive purposes, etc. This resulted in an elevation of the priesthood as the true agents of Christian work. They offered forgiveness and maintained society’s unity, both symbolically and actually in the formal church bureaucracy. The desire for unity by itself, however, cannot explain the complexity of medieval Christian teaching on work and society. That is why we must examine the church’s attempt to stabilize and secure economic resources for itself and the society it created, European Christendom. 5 Generally, the pattern is as follows. The church first dilutes Jesus’ invitation into complete material insecurity and sacrifice, then it justifies the possession of some material security, and finally it makes the development of that material security a Christian virtue. Criticism of that accommodation is then attacked viciously because it now has the power of sin, fear, and anxiety behind it. Christians evidenced a desire for predictability from the gospel, in a word, its domestication . Whereas in Acts and Paul’s letters, giving and sharing of resources seems to be very fluid, dynamic, ad-hoc, and rather uncertain, the church in response to that uncertainty gradually began to emphasize an Israel-like way of living where most people owned land, worked, took sabbaths, made money, tithed, and supported their vocational/occupational clergy. What we have is complete negligence towards the theological continuity-discontinuity between Jesus and Israel regarding land, material wealth, sabbath, tithing laws, etc. in favor of a church-centered hermeneutic where everything in the Bible was read as being for the church, including Israel’s organizational structures. In the Catholic tradition, where the church simply had more authority, this was justified by simply referring to the church’s mission to bring salvation to people and people into the church. In the Protestant tradition, where authority for land ownership often had to come from Scripture more explicitly, the tendency was to develop a biblical theology of wealth out of Old Testament Israel’s occupation of the Promised Land. Colonial America is an example of how Christians justified and promoted land ownership in their theology. John Winthrop’s sermon A Model of Christian Charity was an invocation of Deuteronomic imagery preached by the pastor-governor on the verge of landing on New England’s shores. The Puritans believed that they had made a covenant as a nation with God. Just like Israel, their crossing of a sea was in search of the freedom to worship God. Just like Israel, they arrived at an abundant land thinking they would own it. And just like Israel, they proceeded to exterminate or push aside the inhabitants of the land, the Native Americans.
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