Christian Mission and Poverty

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Christian Mission and Poverty

The work of Aquinas has been influential in the development of modern ideas about law and economics. He is a proponent of natural theology, the idea that God is known through nature and the natural order of things as well as in Scripture and church teaching. Aquinas’ work has come to represent the intellectual fervor of reasoned church teaching. At the same time, Aquinas himself was given to miraculous visions of Christ’s glory and eventually stopped writing the Summa , saying that all he had written seemed to him like “straw” compared to his experience of the living Jesus. This doesn’t mean that he rejected his work but that he saw it as paling in comparison to his experience of God. Aquinas is important to include among the other writers because he shows that, even if one does not embrace the radical poverty of the Franciscans, Christian teaching throughout the ages does not support an inordinate or unjust accumulation of wealth (of course, Christian teaching and Christian practice have not always been the same in this regard). As a medieval theologian, Aquinas used a style of writing that asks questions and then answers them. Aquinas normally presents a few objections to his teaching, then summarizes his main point, and finally replies to the objections one by one. Since this style of writing may be unfamiliar to modern readers, I have reordered it so that we first hear Aquinas’ main point and then hear him present objections and replies together. In the brief and edited examples that follow, Aquinas tackles five questions: Is it okay to have private property? Is it wrong to steal? Is it wrong to take someone else’s property if you are in need? Is it wrong to charge usury (interest on loans for the daily