It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes universes collide.

That’s what happened recently when two of my favorite authors got together for an interview: Frank Viola interviewed NT Wright.

Here is an excerpt from that interview, which touched on a topic that has been on my mind a lot recently, especially with my blog series on tithing.

Frank: In the book, you make several key statements about God’s passion to help the poor. You also make a few statements about how the “powers that be” often neglect the poor. In my country right now (USA) there is a huge debate over this issue among Christians. One aspect of the debate revolves around the question,“Who are the poor exactly?” Some Christians argue that there is a distinction between the poor who are trying to find work and/or who are working (but cannot make ends meet) versus the indigent who refuse to work and expect others to support them.

What do you say to this debate? And how do you think Christians should square Paul’s words in 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15 that if a person “doesn’t work, neither should he eat” with the injunctions in Scripture exhorting God’s people to help the poor?

N.T. Wright: Of course, whenever people discover that other folk are going out of their way to give handouts, some will get lazy and simply try to trade off this goodwill. It’s a telling point, actually, that this was already a danger in the very early church – because you only get that problem arising if the church is being generous. The line between ‘deserving poor’ and ‘undeserving poor’ is very, very hard to draw, and one of the things about poverty, whether one has work or not (some jobs pay so little that the people who do them are still well within the poverty trap), is that it is depressing, and actually saps the energy and nerve and vitality in ways that people like me, who have never been out of work and never been truly poor, can only appreciate by being with and ministering to people who are genuinely and chronically poor.

There is a real danger that in a go-getting country like the USA those who have initiative, energy, advantages of birth and education, can easily look down on those who have none of those things. It simply isn’t the case that every human starts at the same level point so that the rich are those who’ve worked for it and the poor are those who couldn’t be bothered. Throughout the Bible God seems to take special note of those trapped in poverty, and we should do the same.

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